Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
A Lie algebra is called a Heisenberg algebra if its centre coincides with its derived algebra and is one-dimensional. When
is infinite-dimensional, Kac, Kazhdan, Lepowsky, and Wilson have proved that
-modules that satisfy certain conditions are direct sums of a canonical irreducible submodule. This is an algebraic analogue of the Stone-von Neumann theorem. In this paper, we extract quantum Heisenberg algebras,
q (
), from the quantum affine algebras whose vertex representations were constructed by Frenkel and Jing. We introduce the canonical irreducible
q (
)-module Mq and a class Cq of
q (
)-modules that are shown to have the Stone-von Neumann property. The only restriction we place on the complex number q is that it is not a square root of 1. If q 1 and q 2 are not roots of unity, or are both primitive m-th roots of unity, we construct an explicit isomorphism between
q 1(
) and
q 2(
). If q 1 is a primitive m-th root of unity, m odd, q 2 a primitive 2m-th or a primitive 4m-th root of unity, we also construct an explicit isomorphism between
q 1(
) and
q 2(
).