Abstract
6d QFTs are constrained by the analog of ’t Hooft anomaly matching: all anomalies for global symmetries and metric backgrounds are constants of RG flows, and for all vacua in moduli spaces. We discuss an anomaly matching mechanism for 6d \( \mathcal{N}=\left(1,\;0\right) \) theories on their Coulomb branch. It is a global symmetry analog of Green-Schwarz-West-Sagnotti anomaly cancellation, and requires the apparent anomaly mismatch to be a perfect square, \( \varDelta {I}_8=\frac{1}{2}{X}_4^2 \). Then ΔI 8 is cancelled by making X 4 an electric/magnetic source for the tensor multiplet, so background gauge field instantons yield charged strings. This requires the coefficients in X 4 to be integrally quantized. We illustrate this for \( \mathcal{N}=\left(2,\;0\right) \) theories. We also consider the \( \mathcal{N}=\left(1,\;0\right) \) SCFTs from N small E8 instantons, verifying that the recent result for its anomaly polynomial fits with the anomaly matching mechanism.
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Intriligator, K. 6d, \( \mathcal{N}=\left(1,\;0\right) \) Coulomb branch anomaly matching. J. High Energ. Phys. 2014, 162 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2014)162
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2014)162