The moonshine anomaly (Q1729880)

The anomaly of an action of a finite group on a holomorphic conformal field theory is a certain cohomology class that measures the obstruction to gauging the action. The paper under review studies the anomaly for the Monster group acting on its natural representation (also called the moonshine representation). The main result of the paper asserts that this anomaly has order exactly 24 and is not a Chern class. To prove the result, a finite-group version of T-duality is introduced. This duality relates the anomaly in question to the anomaly for the Leech lattice conformal field theory.