Global anomalies in 8d supergravity

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 ${\Omega }_9^{\text{spin}}(BG)$ 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 $8d$ $\mathcal{N}=1$ 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.

28 pages

References in corpus (4)

• Generalized Global Symmetries
• Symmetry Protected Topological Phases, Anomalies, and Cobordisms: Beyond Group Cohomology
• Heisenberg Groups and Noncommutative Fluxes
• 8d gauge anomalies and the topological Green-Schwarz mechanism

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