Nonabelian orbifolds and the boson-fermion correspondence

For a positive integerl divisible by 8 there is a (bosonic) holomorphic vertex operator algebra (VOA) associated to the spin lattice _l . For a broad class of finite groupsG of automorphisms of we prove the existence and uniqueness of irreducibleg-twisted -modules and establish the modular-invariance of the partition functionsZ(g, h, ) for commuting elements inG. In particular, for any finite group there are infinitely many holomorphic VOAs admittingG for which these properties hold. The proof is facilitated by a boson-fermion correspondence which gives a VOA isomorphism between and a certain fermionic construction, and which extends work of Frenkel and others.Supported by NSA grant MDA904-92-H-3099.Supported by NSF grant DMS-9122030.