THE PBW THEOREM FOR AFFINE YANGIANS

Abstract

We prove that the Yangian associated to an untwisted symmetric affine Kac–Moody Lie algebra is isomorphic to the Drinfeld double of a shuffle algebra. The latter is constructed in [YZ14] as an algebraic formalism of cohomological Hall algebras. As a consequence, we obtain the Poincare–Birkhoff–Witt (PBW) theorem for this class of affine Yangians. Another independent proof of the PBW theorem is given recently by Guay, Regelskis, and Wendlandt [GRW18].