Related papers: Twisted differential String and Fivebrane structur…
We study the cohomological physics of fivebranes in type II and heterotic string theory. We give an interpretation of the one-loop term in type IIA, which involves the first and second Pontrjagin classes of spacetime, in terms of…
The main new result here is the cancellation of global anomalies in the Type I superstring, with and without D-branes. Our argument here depends on a precise interpretation of the 2-form abelian gauge field using KO-theory; then the anomaly…
String structures in degree four are associated with cancellation of anomalies of string theory in ten dimensions. Fivebrane structures in degree eight have recently been shown to be associated with cancellation of anomalies associated to…
We study in detail the pattern of anomaly cancellation in D=6 Type IIB Z_N orientifolds, occurring through a generalized Green-Schwarz mechanism involving several RR antisymmetric tensors and scalars fields. The starting point is a direct…
We describe the coupling of holomorphic Chern-Simons theory at large N with Kodaira-Spencer gravity. We explain a new anomaly cancellation mechanism at all loops in perturbation theory for open-closed topological B-model. At one loop this…
We analyse in detail the language of partially non-abelian Deligne cohomology and of twisted differential K-theory, in order to describe the geometry of type II superstring backgrounds with D-branes. This description will also provide the…
The study of string models including both unoriented closed strings and open strings presents a number of new features when compared to the standard case of models of oriented closed strings only. We review some basic features of the…
In models of oriented closed strings, anomaly cancellations are deeply linked to the {\it modular invariance} of the torus amplitude. If open and/or unoriented strings are allowed, there are no non-trivial modular transformations in the…
We perform non-abelian T-duality for a generic Green-Schwarz string with respect to an isometry (super)group G, and we derive the transformation rules for the supergravity background fields. Specializing to G bosonic, or G fermionic but…
Abelian gerbes and twisted bundles describe the topology of the NS-NS 3-form gauge field strength H. We review how they have been usefully applied to study and resolve global anomalies in open string theory. Abelian 2-gerbes and twisted…
It was recently shown that the string theory duals of certain deformations of the N=4 gauge theory can be obtained by a combination of T-duality transformations and coordinate shifts. Here we work out the corresponding procedure of twisting…
We display the full anomaly structure of supergravity, including new D-term contributions to the conformal anomaly. This expression has the super-Weyl and chiral U(1)_K transformation properties that are required for implementation of the…
We characterize the integral cohomology and the rational homotopy type of the maximal Borel-equivariantization of the combined Hopf/twistor fibration, and find that subtle relations satisfied by the cohomology generators are just those that…
In string theory, there are no continuous global symmetries. Discrete symmetries frequently appear, and these can often be understood as unbroken subgroups of larger, spontaneously broken gauge symmetries (discrete gauge symmetries). In…
We study global anomalies of discrete gauge symmetries in six-dimensional supergravities and their realizations in F-theory. We explicitly construct a discrete Green-Schwarz mechanism that depends on the choice of a coupling constant and on…
The worldvolume theory of coincident M5-branes is expected to contain a nonabelian 2-form/nonabelian gerbe gauge theory that is a higher analog of self-dual Yang-Mills theory. But the precise details -- in particular the global moduli /…
We analyze in detail the relation between an exactly marginal deformation of N=4 SYM - the Leigh-Strassler or ``beta-deformation'' - and its string theory dual (recently constructed in hep-th/0502086) by comparing energies of semiclassical…
It has been proposed that gauge and Kaehler anomalies in four-dimensional type IIB orientifolds are cancelled by a generalized Green-Schwarz mechanism involving exchange of twisted RR-fields. We explain how this can be understood using the…
We construct the Green-Schwarz terms of six-dimensional supergravity theories on spacetimes with non-trivial topology and gauge bundle. We prove the cancellation of all global gauge and gravitational anomalies for theories with gauge groups…
String theory dynamics on certain fivebrane supertube backgrounds is described by an exactly solvable null-gauged WZW model. We use this description to compute the spectrum of closed string excitations on the three-charge non-supersymmetric…