Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published May 2021 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

4-manifolds and topological modular forms

Abstract

We build a connection between topology of smooth 4-manifolds and the theory of topological modular forms by considering topologically twisted compactification of 6d (1, 0) theories on 4-manifolds with flavor symmetry backgrounds. The effective 2d theory has (0, 1) supersymmetry and, possibly, a residual flavor symmetry. The equivariant topological Witten genus of this 2d theory then produces a new invariant of the 4-manifold equipped with a principle bundle, valued in the ring of equivariant weakly holomorphic (topological) modular forms. We describe basic properties of this map and present a few simple examples. As a byproduct, we obtain some new results on 't Hooft anomalies of 6d (1, 0) theories and a better understanding of the relation between 2d (0, 1) theories and TMF spectra.

Additional Information

© 2021 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Article funded by SCOAP3. Received: December 9, 2020; Accepted: April 5, 2021; Published: May 11, 2021. We would like to thank Ali Daemi, Mike Freedman, Mike Hopkins, Anton Kapustin, Ciprian Manolescu, Kantaro Ohmori, Shlomo Razamat, Peter Teichner, Edward Witten, Ida Zadeh, Gabi Zafrir, and Michele del Zotto for fruitful discussions. We especially would like to thank Peter Teichner for extensive discusions on topological modular forms and Edward Witten for his suggestion to view the 4-manifold invariants we obtain from 6d (1, 0) theories as defining a class in TMF. The work of S.G. is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF DMS 1664240. The work of D.P. is supported by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632, and in part by the center of excellence grant "Center for Quantum Geometry of Moduli Space" from the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF95). P.P. gratefully acknowledges the support from Marvin L. Goldberger Fellowship and the DOE Grant 51 DE-SC0009988 during his affiliation with IAS. The work of C.V. is supported in part by NSF grant PHY-1067976. We would like to thank the hospitality of Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, International Center for Theoretical Physics, and Max Planck Institute for Mathematics where parts of this work were done.

Attached Files

Published - Gukov2021_Article_4-manifoldsAndTopologicalModul.pdf

Submitted - 1811.07884.pdf

Files

1811.07884.pdf
Files (2.4 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:5234ac59be8bb757b0ebfd740b2ebef6
1.2 MB Preview Download
md5:887283cad4e321647873162a722c78c5
1.2 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023