2025/10/22 by Felix B. Christensen, Iñaki García‐Etxebarria, Christensen, Felix B. +3
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Algebraic structures and combinatorial models #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Mathematical Physics (math-ph) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.19935
openalex publication_date 2025/10/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the presence of 't Hooft anomalies, backgrounds for the symmetries of a quantum field theory can lead to non-conservation of Noether currents, or more generally, to the presence of charged insertions in the path integral. When there is a net background charge, the partition function evaluated on closed manifolds will vanish. For anomalous symmetries, this statement can also be understood as the anomaly theory giving rise to a non-trivial anomalous phase for the partition function even for "rigid" transformations which leave all background fields unchanged. We use the generalisation of this second viewpoint to the setting of anomalous higher-form symmetries in order to show vanishing of the partition function for a number of examples, both with and without a Lagrangian description. In particular, we show how to derive from these considerations the analogue of the Freed-Witten anomaly cancellation condition for the M5-brane, and also that for the D3-brane in S-fold backgrounds.