English

The Topological form is the Pfaffian form

Mathematical Physics 2025-03-13 v1 Combinatorics math.MP Quantum Algebra

Abstract

For a given graph GG, Budzik, Gaiotto, Kulp, Wang, Williams, Wu, Yu, and the first author studied a ''topological'' differential form αG\alpha_G, which expresses violations of BRST-closedness of a quantum field theory along a single topological direction. In a seemingly unrelated context, Brown, Panzer, and the second author studied a ''Pfaffian'' differential form ϕG\phi_G, which is used to construct cohomology classes of the odd commutative graph complex. We give an explicit combinatorial proof that αG\alpha_G coincides with ϕG\phi_G. We also discuss the equivalence of several properties of these forms, which had been established independently for both contexts in previous work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.09558,
  title  = {The Topological form is the Pfaffian form},
  author = {Paul-Hermann Balduf and Simone Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.09558},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:17:50.788Z