The anomaly that was not meant IIB

Arun Debray; Markus Dierigl; Jonathan J. Heckman; Miguel Montero

doi:10.1002/prop.202100168

The anomaly that was not meant IIB

Arun Debray
, Markus Dierigl
, Jonathan J. Heckman
, Miguel Montero

Mathematics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

Type IIB supergravity enjoys a discrete non-Abelian duality group, which has potential quantum anomalies. In this paper we explicitly compute these, and present the bordism group that controls them, modulo some physically motivated assumptions. Quite surprisingly, we find that they do not vanish, which naively would signal an inconsistency of F-theory. Remarkably, a subtle modification of the standard 10d Chern-Simons term cancels these anomalies, a fact which relies on the specific field content of type IIB supergravity. We also discover other ways to cancel this anomaly, via a topological analog of the Green-Schwarz mechanism. These alternative type IIB theories have the same low energy supergravity limit as ordinary type IIB, but a different spectrum of extended objects. They could either be part of the Swampland, or connect to the standard theory via domain walls.

Original language	English
Article number	2100168
Journal	Fortschritte der Physik
Volume	70
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1002/prop.202100168
State	Published - Jan 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Fortschritte der Physik published by Wiley-VCH GmbH

Funding

We thank M. Del Zotto, D. Freed, I. García Etxebarria, J. McNamara and C. Vafa for helpful discussions. We thank D. Freed and E. Torres for comments on an earlier draft. We especially thank Y. Tachikawa and K. Yonekura for correspondence and comments on an earlier draft. JJH and MM thank the 2021 Simons summer workshop at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics for kind hospitality during the completion of this work. The work of JJH is supported in part by the DOE (HEP) Award DE‐SC0013528. MM was supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (602883, CV).

Funders	Funder number
U.S. Department of Energy EPSCoR	DE‐SC0013528
Simons Foundation	602883

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Physics and Astronomy

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10.1002/prop.202100168

Cite this

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The anomaly that was not meant IIB

Abstract

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ASJC Scopus subject areas

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