Kahler Anomalies in Supergravity and Flux Vacua

TL;DR

This paper reviews Kahler anomalies in gauged supergravity, highlighting issues with non-invariant Kahler potentials and Fayet-Iliopoulos couplings, and discusses flux vacua solutions that may circumvent these problems.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of Kahler anomalies in supergravity and explores flux vacua solutions that potentially resolve anomaly-related inconsistencies.

Findings

Flux vacua with gauged U(1) shift symmetries can avoid Kahler anomaly issues.

Kahler anomalies involve complex tensors dependent on scalars, gauge fields, and curvature.

Anomaly cancellation conditions are outlined for future detailed discussion.

Abstract

We review the subject of Kahler anomalies in gauged supergravity, emphasizing that field equations are inconsistent when the Kahler potential is non-invariant under gauge transformations or when there are elementary Fayet-Iliopoulos couplings. Flux vacua solutions of string theory with gauged U(1) shift symmetries appear to avoid this problem. The covariant Kahler anomalies involve tensors which are composite functions of the scalars as well as the gauge field strength and space-time curvature tensors. Anomaly cancellation conditions will be discussed in a sequel to this paper.