Related papers: Global gravitational anomaly cancellation for five…
Fermion fields on an M-theory five-brane carry a representation of the double cover of the structure group of the normal bundle. It is shown that, on an arbitrary oriented Lorentzian six-manifold, there is always an Sp(2) twist that allows…
Anomaly cancellation for M-theory fivebranes requires the introduction of a "bump-form" which smoothes out the five-brane source. We discuss the physical origin of this bump-form in the simpler case of axion strings in 3+1 dimensions and…
We study a five-dimensional field theory which contains a monopole (string) solution with chiral fermion zero modes. This monostring solution is a close analog of the fivebrane solution of M-theory. The cancellation of normal bundle…
We discuss anomaly cancellation in $U(2)$ gauge theories in four dimensions. For a $U(2)$ gauge theory defined with a spin structure, the vanishing of the bordism group $\Omega_5^{\text{Spin}}(BU(2))$ implies that there can be no global…
The anomaly due to the chiral fermions on the world-volume of the SO(32) five-brane is calculated. It is shown that this contribution has the correct structure for it to be cancelled by the variation of the classical world-volume action.…
We construct the action for N M2-branes on $S^1/{Z}_2$. The resulting theory has a gauge anomaly but this can be cancelled if the two fixed point planes each support 8 chiral Fermions in the fundamental of U(N). Taking the low energy limit…
We determine the anomaly polynomial of the E-string theory and its higher-rank generalizations, that is, the 6d $\mathcal{N} =(1, 0)$ superconformal theories on the worldvolume of one or multiple M5-branes embedded within the…
This is a short review of the papers arXiv:1109.2904 and arXiv:1110.4639. After a reminder about local and global gravitational anomalies, we sketch the derivation of the global gravitational anomaly of the self-dual field theory (also…
On the world-volume of an $M$-theory five-brane propagates a two-form with self-dual field strength. As this field is non-Lagrangian, there is no obvious framework for determining its partition function. An analogous problem exists in Type…
The effective action for five-dimensional heterotic M-theory in the presence of five-branes is systematically derived from Horava-Witten theory coupled to an M5-brane world-volume theory. This leads to a five-dimensional N=1 gauged…
Lower-dimensional (hyper)surfaces that can carry gauge or gauge/gravitational anomalies occur in many areas of physics: one-plus-one-dimensional boundaries or two-dimensional defect surfaces in condensed matter systems, four-dimensional…
The effective four-dimensional supergravity of M-theory compactified on the orbifold S^1/Z_2 and a Calabi-Yau threefold includes in general moduli supermultiplets describing massless modes of five-branes. For each brane, one of these fields…
We study the constraints on five-dimensional N=1 heterotic M-theory imposed by a consistent anomaly-free coupling of bulk and boundary theory. This requires analyzing the cancellation of triangle gauge anomalies on the four-dimensional…
The quantum consistency of sigma-models describing the dynamics of extended objects in a curved background requires the cancellation of their world-volume anomalies, which are conformal anomalies for the heterotic string and $SO(1,5)$…
The worldvolume theory of M5-branes on an ADE singularity $\mathbb{R}^5/\Gamma_G$ can be Higgsed in various ways, corresponding to the possible nilpotent orbits of $G$. In the F-theory dual picture, this corresponds to activating T-brane…
Chiral and non-chiral $p$-form gauge fields have gravitational anomalies and anomalies of Green-Schwarz type. This means that they are most naturally realized as the boundary modes of bulk topological phases in one higher dimensions. We…
In this informal review for non-specalists we discuss the construction of maximally supersymmetric gauge theories that arise on the worldvolumes branes in String Theory and M-Theory. Particular focus is made on the relatively recent…
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…
We study gauge and gravitational anomalies of fermions and 2-form fields on eight-dimensional spin manifolds. Possible global gauge anomalies are classified by spin bordism groups $\Omega^{\text{spin}}_9(BG)$ which we determine by spectral…
We discuss the different nature of the gauge theories on a D-brane or a stack of D-branes, in type II superstring theory, as follows from the Freed-Witten anomaly. Usually on a D-brane world-volume there is a standard gauge theory,…