English

The mixed $0$-form/$1$-form anomaly in Hilbert space: pouring new wine into old bottles

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-10-27 v2 High Energy Physics - Lattice

Abstract

We study four-dimensional gauge theories with arbitrary simple gauge group with 11-form global center symmetry and 00-form parity or discrete chiral symmetry. We canonically quantize on T3\mathbb{T}^3, in a fixed background field gauging the 11-form symmetry. We show that the mixed 00-form/11-form 't Hooft anomaly results in a central extension of the global-symmetry operator algebra. We determine this algebra in each case and show that the anomaly implies degeneracies in the spectrum of the Hamiltonian at any finite-size torus. We discuss the consistency of these constraints with both older and recent semiclassical calculations in SU(N)SU(N) theories, with or without adjoint fermions, as well as with their conjectured infrared phases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.11442,
  title  = {The mixed $0$-form/$1$-form anomaly in Hilbert space: pouring new wine into old bottles},
  author = {Andrew A. Cox and Erich Poppitz and F. David Wandler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.11442},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

53 pages, 0 figures. Typos corrected, comments and references added. To appear in JHEP