The Canonical Structure of Wess-Zumino-Witten Models

The phase space of the Wess-Zumino-Witten model on a circle with target space a compact, connected, semisimple Lie group $G$ is defined and the corresponding symplectic form is given. We present a careful derivation of the Poisson brackets of the Wess-Zumino-Witten model. We also study the canonical structure of the supersymmetric and the gauged Wess-Zumino-Witten models.