Annihilating fields of standard modules for affine Lie algebras

Given an affine Kac-Moody Lie algebra of arbitrary type, we determine certain minimal sets of annihilating fields of standard -modules. We then use these sets in order to obtain a characterization of standard -modules in terms of irreducible loop -modules, which proves to be a useful tool for combinatorial constructions of bases for standard -modules. Received April 21 , 1999; in final form September 8, 1999 / Published online February 5, 2001