English

Global Anomalies in Canonical Gravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-10-30 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In this note we study the structure of diffeomorphism anomalies in 3+1 canonical gravity coupled to a chiral massless fermion. We find that when the spatial manifold is S^3 or a Lens space L(p,q), the first homotopy group of the related diffeomorphism group can be nontrivial and hence the question of global anomalies becomes relevant. Here we show that for gravity coupled to SU(2) chiral fermions, assuming the strong form of the Hatcher conjecture, SU(2)-induced diffeomorphism anomalies do not occur whenever the spatial manifold is S^3 or a Lens space.

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/9709170,
  title  = {Global Anomalies in Canonical Gravity},
  author = {Sumati Surya and Sachindeo Vaidya},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/9709170},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

17 pages, LaTeX, uses packages amstex, amssymb. One reference added, one sign error corrected. Conclusions unchanged. To appear in Nucl. Phys. B

R2 v1 2026-07-22T16:07:03.032Z