Beschreibung
Global anomalies and Bordism of Non-Supersymmetric Strings
The three tachyon-free non-supersymmetric string theories in ten dimensions provide a handle on quantum gravity away from the supersymmetric lamppost. However, they have not been shown to be fully consistent; although local anomalies cancel due to versions of the Green-Schwarz mechanism, there could be global anomalies that could become fatal pathologies. We study these global anomalies in the three ten-dimensional non-supersymmetric, tachyon-free string theories. We demonstrate how they cancel by showing that the relevant bordism classes are trivial. An anomaly inflow argument allows us to shed light on the worldvolume degrees of freedom of the NS5 brane in the SO(16) x SO(16) theory. Finally, the bordism groups we compute can be used to predict the existence of new non-supersymmetric branes in these theories, by means of the cobordism conjecture.
