BV Structure of the Cohomology of Nilpotent Subalgebras and the Geometry of(W) Strings

Given a simple, simply laced, complex Lie algebra corresponding to the Lie group G, let be thesubalgebra generated by the positive roots. In this Letter we construct aBV algebra whose underlying graded commutative algebra is given by the cohomology, with respect to , of the algebra of regular functions on G with values in . We conjecture that describes the algebra of allphysical (i.e., BRST invariant) operators of the noncritical string. The conjecture is verified in the two explicitly known cases, ₂ (the Virasoro string) and ₃ (the string).