Related papers: Anomaly of Continuous Symmetries from Topological …
We study 't Hooft anomalies for discrete global symmetries in bosonic theories in 2, 3 and 4 dimensions. We show that such anomalies may arise in gauge theories with topological terms in the action, if the total symmetry group is a…
We explore the connection between the global symmetry quantum numbers of line defects and 't Hooft anomalies. Relative to local (point) operators, line defects may transform projectively under both internal and spacetime symmetries. This…
Symmetries in Quantum Field Theory may have 't Hooft anomalies. If the symmetry is unbroken in the vacuum, the anomaly implies a nontrivial low-energy limit, such as gapless modes or a topological field theory. If the symmetry is…
We describe a systematic way of computing the 't Hooft anomalies for continuous symmetries of Quantum Field Theories in even dimensions that can be geometrically engineered from M5-branes. Our approach is based on anomaly inflow, and…
We show that certain 't~Hooft anomalies that evade detection on commonly used closed four-dimensional manifolds become visible when a quantum field theory is placed on asymptotically locally Euclidean (ALE) spaces. As a concrete example, we…
We discuss the geometric origin of discrete higher form symmetries of quantum field theories in terms of defect groups from geometric engineering in M-theory. The flux non-commutativity in M-theory gives rise to (mixed) 't Hooft anomalies…
I review some recent results on understanding the physics of metals in an exact non-perturbative way through the powerful field-theoretic concepts of emergent symmetries and 't Hooft anomalies. A 't Hooft anomaly is a discrete topological…
It is customary to couple a quantum system to external classical fields. One application is to couple the global symmetries of the system (including the Poincar\'{e} symmetry) to background gauge fields (and a metric for the Poincar\'{e}…
't Hooft anomaly matching is powerful for constraining the low energy phases of gauge theories. In 3d one common anomaly is the parity anomaly in a $T$-symmetric theory where one cannot gauge the global symmetry group without breaking the…
We study 't Hooft anomalies for a global discrete internal symmetry G. We construct examples of bosonic field theories in three dimensions with a non-vanishing 't Hooft anomaly for a discrete global symmetry. We also construct field…
In general quantum field theories (QFTs), ordinary (0-form) global symmetries and 1-form symmetries can combine into 2-group global symmetries. We describe this phenomenon in detail using the language of symmetry defects. We exhibit a…
We propose the general idea that 't Hooft anomalies of generalized global symmetries can be understood in terms of the properties of solitonic defects, which generically are non-topological defects. The defining property of such defects is…
We examine six-dimensional quantum field theories through the lens of higher-form global symmetries. Every Yang-Mills gauge theory in six dimensions, with field strength $f^{(2)}$, naturally gives rise to a continuous 1-form global symmetry…
All five-dimensional non-abelian gauge theories have a $U(1)_I$ global symmetry associated with instantonic particles. We describe an obstruction to coupling $U(1)_I$ to a classical background gauge field that occurs whenever the theory has…
Symmetry breaking of continuous symmetries by extended dynamical defects entails the existence of defect families, which form conformal manifolds in a critical setup. In the presence of bulk 't Hooft anomalies, defects are in fact required…
An 't Hooft anomaly is the obstruction for gauging symmetries, and it constrains possible low-energy behaviors of quantum field theories by excluding trivial infrared theories. Global inconsistency condition is recently proposed as a milder…
We show that certain global anomalies can be detected in an elementary fashion by analyzing the way the symmetry algebra is realized on the torus Hilbert space of the anomalous theory. Distinct anomalous behaviours imprinted in the Hilbert…
We present a class of three-dimensional quantum field theories whose ordinary global symmetries mix with higher-form symmetries to form a continuous 2-group. All these models can be obtained by performing a gauging procedure in a parent…
A global symmetry of a quantum field theory is said to have an 't Hooft anomaly if it cannot be promoted to a local symmetry of a gauged theory. In this paper, we show that the anomaly is also an obstruction to defining symmetric boundary…
We consider, in the effective field theory context, anomalies of gauge field theories on a slice of a five-dimensional, Anti-de Sitter geometry and their four-dimensional, holographic duals. A consistent effective field theory description…