Many extensions of the Standard Model include an extra gauge boson, whose couplings to fermions are constrained by the requirement that anomalies cancel. We find a general solution to the resulting diophantine equations in the plausible case where the chiral fermion content is that of the Standard Model plus 3 right-handed neutrinos.
In this note we review the role of homotopy groups in determining non-perturbative (henceforth `global) gauge anomalies, in light of recent progress understanding global anomalies using bordism. We explain why non-vanishing of $pi_d(G)$ is neither a
necessary nor a sufficient condition for there being a possible global anomaly in a $d$-dimensional chiral gauge theory with gauge group $G$. To showcase the failure of sufficiency, we revisit `global anomalies that have been previously studied in 6d gauge theories with $G=SU(2)$, $SU(3)$, or $G_2$. Even though $pi_6(G) eq 0$, the bordism groups $Omega_7^mathrm{Spin}(BG)$ vanish in all three cases, implying there are no global anomalies. In the case of $G=SU(2)$ we carefully scrutinize the role of homotopy, and explain why any 7-dimensional mapping torus must be trivial from the bordism perspective. In all these 6d examples, the conditions previously thought to be necessary for global anomaly cancellation are in fact necessary conditions for the local anomalies to vanish.
We highlight what seems to be a remaining subtlety in the argument for the cancellation of the total anomaly associated with the M5-brane in M-theory. Then we prove that this subtlety is resolved under the hypothesis that the C-field flux is charge-q
uantized in the generalized cohomology theory called J-twisted Cohomotopy.
We characterize the integral cohomology and the rational homotopy type of the maximal Borel-equivariantization of the combined Hopf/twistor fibration, and find that subtle relations satisfied by the cohomology generators are just those that govern Ho
rava-Wittens proposal for the extension of the Green-Schwarz mechanism from heterotic string theory to heterotic M-theory. We discuss how this squares with the Hypothesis H that the elusive mathematical foundation of M-theory is based on charge quantization in J-twisted Cohomotopy theory.
We prove that the swampland for D=10 N=1 SUGRA coupled to D=10 N=1 SYM is only populated by U(1)^496 and E_8 x U(1)^248. With this goal in mind, we review the anomalies for classical and exceptional groups, retrieving trace identities up to the sixth
power of the curvature for each class of groups. We expand this idea for low-dimensional groups, for which the trace of the sixth power is known to factorize, and we retrieve such factorization. We obtain the total anomaly polynomials for individual low dimensional groups and combinations of them and finally we investigate their non-factorization, in such a way that U(1)^496and E_8 xU(1)^248 are non-trivially shown to be the only anomaly-free theories allowed in D=10. Using the method developed for checking the factorization of gauge theories, we retrieve the Green-Schwarz terms for the two theories populating the swampland.
We establish the non-perturbative validity of the gauge anomaly cancellation condition in an effective electroweak theory of massless fermions with finite momentum cut-off and Fermi interaction. The requirement that the current is conserved up to ter
ms smaller than the energy divided by the cut-off scale, which is the natural condition as gauge invariance is only emerging, produces the same constraint on charges as in the Standard Model. The result holds at a non-perturbative level as the functional integrals are expressed by convergent power series expansions and are analytic in a finite domain.