Anomaly Inflow and the $\eta$-Invariant

Abstract

Perturbative fermion anomalies in spacetime dimension $d$ have a well-known relation to Chern-Simons functions in dimension $D=d+1$. This relationship is manifested in a beautiful way in "anomaly inflow" from the bulk of a system to its boundary. Along with perturbative anomalies, fermions also have global or nonperturbative anomalies, which can be incorporated by using the $\eta$-invariant of Atiyah, Patodi, and Singer instead of the Chern-Simons function. Here we give a nonperturbative description of anomaly inflow, involving the $\eta$-invariant. This formula has been expected in the past based on the Dai-Freed theorem, but has not been fully justified. It leads to a general description of perturbative and nonperturbative fermion anomalies in $d$ dimensions in terms of an $\eta$-invariant in $D$ dimensions. This $\eta$-invariant is a cobordism invariant whenever perturbative anomalies cancel.

60 pages. To appear in the proceedings of the Shoucheng Zhang Memorial Workshop. v2: minor improvements and references added. v3: minor corrections

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