
You may wish to look into the Lectures on Classical W-Algebras by L.A. Dickey. Also, there are older lecture notes by C.N. Pope (intended for the physicists, I guess) and another introductory text by G.M.T. Watts.

My motivation for studying finite W-algebras comes from geometric representation theory; just as the universal enveloping algebra is a quantization of $\mathfrak{g}^*$ with its Kostant-Kirillov Poisson bracket, the W-algebra is a quantization of a Poisson reduction of $\mathfrak{g}^*$, the Slodow...

Does anyone know of an introduction and motivation for W-algebras?
Edit: Okay, sorry I try to add some more background. W algebras occur, for example when you study nilpotent orbits: Take a nice algebraic/Lie group. It acts on its Lie-algebra by the adjoint action. Fix a nilpotent element e and m...
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