Symmetries and Strings in Field Theory and Gravity
By T. Banks, N. Seiberg. 2010
903 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We discuss aspects of global and gauged symmetries in quantum field theory and quantum gravity, focusing on discrete gauge symmetries. An effective Lagrangian description of Zp gauge theories shows that they are associated with an emergent Zp one-form (KalbRamond) gauge symmetry. This understanding leads us to uncover new observables and new phenomena in nonlinear σ-models. It also allows us to expand on Polchinski’s classification of cosmic strings. We argue that in models of quantum gravity, there are no global symmetries, all continuous gauge symmetries are compact, and all charges allowed by Dirac quantization are present in the spectrum. These conjectures are not new, but we present them from a streamlined and unified perspective. Finally, our discussion about string charges and symmetries leads to a more physical and more complete understanding of recently found consistency conditions of supergravity.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41ba39db00717999244f9c32e901c7555dd32f5b
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Citations in the corpus
- Exploring 2-group global symmetries (2018, background): “Therefore the presence of a continuous 1-form global symmetry does not require abelian gauge fields (see also [63,25,1]).”
- Wall-crossing in coupled 2d-4d systems (2011, background): “In a recent paper the effects of gauging finite global symmetry groups in supergravity theories was studied [46, 47].”
- F-theory on all toric hypersurface fibrations and its Higgs branches (2014, background): “In order to have an effective theory that makes sense also in a quantum gravity model, it has been argued in [89] that all charges allowed by Dirac quantization have to be present in the spectrum.”
- Coupling a QFT to a TQFT and duality (2014, background): “These theories were first introduced in [20] and were later identified as Zn gauge theories in [2, 21].”
- Comments on Chern-Simons contact terms in three dimensions (2012, methodology): “In order to compute the contact term κ corresponding to jµ, we naively integrate out the dynamical field Aµ to obtain an effective Lagrangian for aµ, Leff = iκ 4π εµνρaµ∂νaρ , κ = q − p2 k .”
- A stringy test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (2018, background): “In order to avoid tension with the conjectural requirement that no global continuous symmetries exist in any consistent theory of quantum gravity [54,55], the weak coupling point φ∞ must lie at infinite distance in moduli space.”
- A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, background): “In a different approach, one can choose G to be a gauge symmetry in order to avoid potential drawbacks of discrete global symmetries such as incompatibility with quantum gravity [813] or domain walls [814].”
- Transplanckian axions!? (2015, background): “This is in accordance with the considerations in [56] that in a quantum theory of gravity one expects to have all possible charged objects.”
- A general proof of the quantum null energy condition (2017, methodology): “We can literally view the resulting theory as a discrete gauging of the replica symmetry, by coupling the theory to a continuum version of a discrete gauge theory as reviewed in [74].”
- Gapped boundary phases of topological insulators via weak coupling (2016, methodology): “3 ZN Here we give a continuum description of ZN Chern-Simons gauge theory [63, 64].”
- Black holeʼs 1/N hair (2012, methodology): “A similar argument was made quantitative and was used to put a bound on dimensionality of maximal representation of the global symmetry group in [9, 10].”
- F-term axion monodromy inflation (2014, background): “The above action describes a 4d 3-form gauge potential which eats up a 2-form field; both fields acquire a mass μ in a p-form generalization of the Higgs mechanism (see [39], also [40] for a recent general discussion), and its gauge symmetry is very similar to that appearing in the discussion of dis”
- Higher spin gravity with matter in AdS3 and its CFT dual (2011, background): “gauged), as anticipated in any quantum theory of gravity [32].”
- On 2-group global symmetries and their anomalies (2018, background): “Consider the Abelian ZN Chern-Simons theory, that can be described by two U(1) gauge fields u, w [48, 49, 35]: SCS = K 4π ∫ u du+ N 2π ∫ u dw , (6.”