English

Global anomalies in 8d supergravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-08-10 v1

Abstract

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 Ω9spin(BG)\Omega^{\text{spin}}_9(BG) which we determine by spectral sequence techniques, and we also identify their explicit generator manifolds. It turns out that a fermion in the adjoint representation of any simple Lie group, and a gravitino in 8d8d N=1\mathcal{N}=1 supergravity theory, have anomalies. We discuss how a 2-form field, which also appears in supergravity, produces anomalies which cancel against these fermion anomalies in a certain class of supergravity theories. In another class of theories, the anomaly of the gravitino is not cancelled by the 2-form field, but by topological degrees of freedom. It gives a restriction on the topology of spacetime manifolds which is not visible at the level of differential-form analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.12631,
  title  = {Global anomalies in 8d supergravity},
  author = {Yasunori Lee and Kazuya Yonekura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.12631},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

28 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:23:48.522Z