Equivariant cohomotopy implies orientifold tadpole cancellation (Q2197168)

The authors show that brane charge quantization in unstable equivariant Cohomotopy implies the anomaly cancelation conditions for M-branes and D-branes on flat orbi-orientifolds. The authors first discuss basics of plain unstable Cohomotopy on plain manifolds and show that the unstable Pontrjagin-Thom theorem identifies cocycles in unstable Cohomotopy theory with cobordism classes of submanifolds carrying certain extra structure. These submanifolds are naturally identified with the worldvolumes of branes that source the corresponding Cohomotopy charge, and the normal structure they carry corresponds to the charge carried by the branes, distinguishing branes from anti-branes. Furthermore the coboundaries in unstable Cohomotopy correspond to brane pair creation/annihilation processes. The authors introduce the enhancement of this situation to equivariant Cohomotopy on toroidal orbifolds, where it encodes joint D-brane and O-plane charges. They show that the equivariant Hopf degree theorem encodes the form of local/twisted tadpole cancelation conditions, and explain that super-differential refinement at global Elmendorf stage encodes the form of global/untwisted tadpole cancelation conditions. Finally, the authors specify these general considerations to the physics of M5-branes at MO5-planes in toroidal ADE-orientifolds in M-theory, with the \(C\)-field charge-quantized in equivariant Cohomotopy theory. For this purpose the authors discuss the situation of heterotic M-theory on ADE-orbifolds and highlight subtleties in the interpretation of MO5-planes. With this in hand, they apply the general discussion of equivariant Cohomotopy to ADE-singularities intersecting MO9-planes in M-theory, and find that this correctly encodes the expected anomaly cancellation of M5-branes at MO5-planes, and the RR-field tadpole anomaly cancelation for D-branes on ADE-orientifolds.