A note on modular forms and generalized anomaly cancellation formulas (Q1935717)

In their famous paper on gravitational anomalies [``Gravitational anomalies'', Nucl. Phys., B 234, No. 2, 269--330 (1984; \url{doi:10.1016/0550-3213(84)90066-X})], \textit{L. Alvarez-Gaumé} and \textit{E. Witten} discovered a ``miraculous cancellation'' formula that gives rise to a non-trivial relation between the top components of the Hirzebruch \(\widehat L\)-form and \(\widehat A\)-form on a 12-dimensional Riemannian manifold. As elucidated in [\textit{K. Liu}, Commun. Math. Phys. 174, No. 1, 29--42 (1995; Zbl 0867.57021)], this relation can be understood by the modularity properties of formal \(q\)-series of characteristic forms and as such admits a generalization to \((8k+4)\)-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. This theme has many variations and has been developed further by several authors, by including auxiliary bundles, additional twisting by a line bundle and transgression to secondary characteristic forms. In the paper under review, the authors obtain a new set of \((a,b)\)-type cancellation formulas on a \(4k\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold, where \(a,b\) are integers. This is achieved by making a clever use of the modular transformation properties of certain characteristic forms and by considering twisting by one respectively two complex line bundles. The main theorems subsume several previous results in the literature and in particular, \(a=1\) and \(b=0\) reduces to the Han-Liu-Zhang cancellation formula [\textit{F. Han} et al., J. Geom. Phys. 62, No. 5, 1038--1053 (2012; Zbl 1314.11025)]. The final section deals with the case of \((4k-1)\)-dimensional manifolds and establishes a relation between modular forms of weight \(2k\) over the subgroup \(\Gamma_0(2) \subset\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb Z)\) (generated by \(T\) and \(ST^2ST\)) obtained by transgression.