Global anomalies and chiral p-forms

TL;DR

This paper reviews the derivation of global gravitational anomalies in chiral p-form theories and demonstrates that certain cohomological type IIB supergravity models are anomaly-free on all ten-dimensional spin manifolds.

Contribution

It provides a concise review of global gravitational anomalies in chiral p-forms and proves the anomaly cancellation in specific supergravity models.

Findings

Global gravitational anomaly of self-dual fields derived

Cohomological type IIB supergravity is anomaly-free on all ten-dimensional spin manifolds

Clarifies the distinction between local and global anomalies

Abstract

This is a short review of the papers arXiv:1109.2904 and arXiv:1110.4639. After a reminder about local and global gravitational anomalies, we sketch the derivation of the global gravitational anomaly of the self-dual field theory (also known as chiral p-form). We then show that "cohomological" type IIB supergravity is free of global gravitational anomalies on all ten-dimensional spin manifolds