QUANTIZATION OF LIE BIALGEBRAS, PART VI: QUANTIZATION OF GENERALIZED KAC-MOODY ALGEBRAS

This paper is a continuation of the series of papers "Quantization of Lie bialgebras (QLB) I-V". We show that the image of a Kac-Moody Lie bialgebra with the standard quasitriangular structure under the quantization functor defined in QLB-I,II is isomorphic to the Drinfeld-Jimbo quantization of this Lie bialgebra, with the standard quasitriangular structure. This implies that when the quantization parameter is formal, then the category O for the quantized Kac-Moody algebra is equivalent, as a braided tensor category, to the category O over the corresponding classical Kac-Moody algebra, with the tensor category structure defined by a Drinfeld associator. This equivalence is a generalization of the functor constructed previously by G. Lusztig and the second author. In particular, we answer positively a question of Drinfeld whether the characters of irreducible highest weight modules for quantized Kac-Moody algebras are the same as in the classical case. Moreover, our results are valid for the Lie algebra g(A) (it was previously proved by Varchenko using integral formulas for solutions of the KZ equations).