1995/03/29 by Paul S. Aspinwall, David R. Morrison, Mark Gross
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Conformal field theory #Conformal map #Differential geometry #Gravitational singularity #Homotopy and Cohomology in Algebraic Topology #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Singularity #Singularity theory #String field theory #String theory #Torsion (gastropod) #alg-geom #hep-th #math.AG
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/bf02104911
published as Commun.Math.Phys. 178 (1996) 115-134 · 25 pages and 3 figures, LaTeX with epsf. Appendix by Mark Gross
arxiv created 1995/03/29 · openalex publication_date 1996/05/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study a topological obstruction of a very stringy nature concerned with deforming the target space of an N=2 non-linear \sm. This target space has a singularity which may be smoothed away according to the conventional rules of geometry but when one studies the associated conformal field theory one sees that such a deformation is not possible without a discontinuous change in some of the correlation functions. This obstruction appears to come from torsion in the homology of the target space (which is seen by deforming the theory by an irrelevant operator). We discuss the link between this phenomenon and orbifolds with discrete torsion as studied by Vafa and Witten.