English

6d, N=(1,0) Coulomb Branch Anomaly Matching

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-22 v1

Abstract

6d QFTs are constrained by the analog of 't Hooft anomaly matching: all anomalies for global symmetries and metric backgrounds are constants of RG flows, and for all vacua in moduli spaces. We discuss an anomaly matching mechanism for 6d N=(1,0) theories on their Coulomb branch. It is a global symmetry analog of Green-Schwarz-West-Sagnotti anomaly cancellation, and requires the apparent anomaly mismatch to be a perfect square, ΔI8=12X42\Delta I_8={1\over 2}X_4^2. Then ΔI8\Delta I_8 is cancelled by making X4X_4 an electric / magnetic source for the tensor multiplet, so background gauge field instantons yield charged strings. This requires the coefficients in X4X_4 to be integrally quantized. We illustrate this for N=(2,0) theories. We also consider the N=(1,0) SCFTs from N small E8E_8 instantons, verifying that the recent result for its anomaly polynomial fits with the anomaly matching mechanism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.6745,
  title  = {6d, N=(1,0) Coulomb Branch Anomaly Matching},
  author = {Kenneth Intriligator},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.6745},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

12 pages, no figures