English

The Arf-Brown-Kervaire invariant on a lattice

High Energy Physics - Lattice 2025-12-29 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics High Energy Physics - Theory Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We propose a lattice formulation of the Arf-Brown-Kervaire (ABK) invariant which takes values in Z8\mathbb{Z}_8. Compared to the standard Z\mathbb{Z}-valued index, the ABK invariant is more involved in that it arises in Majorana fermion partition functions with reflection symmetry on two-dimensional non-orientable manifolds, and its definition contains an infinite sum over Dirac eigenvalues that requires proper regularization. We employ the massive Wilson Dirac operator, with and without domain-walls, on standard two-dimensional square lattices, and use its Pfaffian for the definition. Twisted boundary conditions and cross-caps, which reverse the orientation, are introduced to realize nontrivial topologies equipped with nontrivial Pin\mathrm{Pin}^{-} structures of Majorana fermions. We verify numerically (and partly analytically) that our formulation on a torus, Klein bottle, real projective plane (as well as its triple connected sum), and two types of M\"obius strip reproduces the known values in continuum theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.11424,
  title  = {The Arf-Brown-Kervaire invariant on a lattice},
  author = {Sho Araki and Hidenori Fukaya and Tetsuya Onogi and Satoshi Yamaguchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.11424},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

29 pages, 9 figures