Related papers: Chern-Weil Global Symmetries and How Quantum Gravi…
The following two loosely connected sets of topics are reviewed in these lecture notes: 1) Gauge invariance, its treatment in field theories and its implications for internal symmetries and edge states such as those in the quantum Hall…
An intriguing feature of the Standard Model is that the representations of the unbroken gauge symmetries are vector-like whereas those of the spontaneously broken gauge symmetries are chiral. Here we provide a toy model which shows that a…
The equivalence between Chern-Simons and Einstein-Hilbert actions in three dimensions established by A.~Ach\'ucarro and P.~K.~Townsend (1986) and E.~Witten (1988) is generalized to the off-shell case. The technique is also generalized to…
A number of different approaches to quantum gravity are at least partly phenomenologically characterized by their treatment of Lorentz symmetry, in particular whether the symmetry is exact or modified/broken at the smallest scales. For…
We investigate the effects of Chern-Simons-Gauss-Bonnet gravity on fundamental metrics. This theory involves perturbative corrections to general relativity, as well as two scalar fields, the axion and the dilaton, that arise from…
We study low-energy dynamics of $[SU(N)]^K$ chiral quiver gauge theories in connection with $\mathcal{N}=1$ super Yang-Mills (SYM) theory, and quantum chromodynamics with bi-fundamental fermions (QCD(BF)). These theories can be obtained by…
We demonstrate a universal mechanism of a class of instabilities in infrared regions for massless Abelian $p$-form gauge theories with topological interactions, which we call generalized chiral instabilities. Such instabilities occur in the…
The Standard Model of particle physics describes electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, which are three of the four known fundamental forces of nature. The unification of the fourth interaction, gravity, with the Standard Model has…
We consider various models of three-dimensional gravity with torsion or nonmetricity (metric affine gravity), and show that they can be written as Chern-Simons theories with suitable gauge groups. Using the groups ISO(2,1), SL(2,C) or…
We study the no-global-symmetry conjecture in quantum gravity by modeling black holes as non-isometric codes that encode the interior states with global charges into the fundamental states. The fluctuation in the inner products of the…
We consider the conformal group of a space of dim n=p+q, with SO(p,q) metric. The quotient of this group by its homogeneous Weyl subgroup gives a principal fiber bundle with 2n-dim base manifold and Weyl fibers. The Cartan generalization to…
We propose quantum gravitational constraints on effective four-dimensional theories with N=1 supersymmetry. These Swampland constraints arise by demanding consistency of the worldsheet theory of a class of axionic, or EFT, strings whose…
In axion-Maxwell theory at the minimal axion-photon coupling, we find non-invertible 0- and 1-form global symmetries arising from the naive shift and center symmetries. Since the Gauss law is anomalous, there is no conserved,…
Certain (3+1)-dimensional chiral non-Abelian gauge theories have been shown to exhibit a new type of global gauge anomaly, which in the Hamiltonian formulation is due to the fermion zero-modes of a Z-string-like configuration of the gauge…
We study field theories with global dipole symmetries and gauge dipole symmetries. The famous Lifshitz theory is an example of a theory with a global dipole symmetry. We study in detail its 1+1d version with a compact field. When this…
A gauge theory of quantum gravity is formulated, in which an internal, field dependent metric is introduced which non-linearly realizes the gauge fields on the non-compact group $SL(2,C)$, while linearly realizing them on $SU(2)$.…
We prove that N=2 theories that arise by taking n free hypermultiplets and gauging a subgroup of Sp(n), the non-R global symmetry of the free theory, have a remaining global symmetry which is a direct sum of unitary, symplectic, and special…
We revisit the issue that the Noether current associated with a local scale symmtery, or equivalently the Weyl symmetry, identically vanishes. Based on only the second Noether theorem for a local symmetry, we prove that the Noether current…
We present the gravity dual to a class of three-dimensional N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories on a U(1) x U(1)-invariant squashed three-sphere, with a non-trivial background gauge field. This is described by a supersymmetric solution of…
A complete canonical formulation of general covariance makes it possible to construct new modified theories of gravity that are not of higher-curvature form, as shown here in a spherically symmetric setting. The usual uniqueness theorems…