Feynman diagrams and the KdV hierarchy

Abstract

The generating series of the intersection numbers of the stable cohomology classes on moduli spaces of curves satisfies the string equation and a KdV hierarchy. Kontsevich's original proof of this result uses a matrix model and the matrix Airy equation. Witten then recasted Kontsevich's results in terms of Virasoro algebras, by means of an ingenious mixture of Feynman diagrams techniques and integrations by parts with some "rather formidable choice" of the integrands. In this note we show how Witten's formidable choices can be bartered for standard Feynman diagram manipulations, as soon as one suitably enlarges the class of Feynman diagrams occurring in the proof.

25 pages, LaTeX 2e, uses Xy-Pic. Minor changes, bibliography updated. The abstract of the previous version was potentially misleading, so it has been rewritten to provide a better description of the contents of the paper