A note on generalized twisted anomaly cancellation formulas (Q606298)

Recall that in physics, effective actions with chiral fermions coupled to external fields may suffer from anomalies, that is breakdown of diffeomorphism or gauge invariance. However, if the action contains the right number of left- and right-handed fermions, there is an overall anomaly cancellation between the different terms in the action. As a fortunate by-product, it may lead to interesting relations between characteristic forms of the complexified tangent bundle of the space-time manifold. If the fermions are also coupled to a gauge field, there will be an additional twist by a vector bundle. In some cases these cancellation formulas can be extended to dimensions higher than usually considered by physicists. Indeed, on Riemannian manifolds of appropriate dimension, certain characteristic forms containing the Hirzebruch \(\hat L\)-form and \(\hat A\)-form exhibit modular invariance properties. Using properties of modular forms, anomaly cancellation formulas have been established in dimensions \((8k+j)\) where \(j=0,2,4,6\). The present paper uses similar techniques as in [\textit{F. Han} and \textit{X. Huang}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 359, No.~11, 5365--5381 (2007; Zbl 1151.53032)], to prove new twisted anomaly cancellation formulas in dimensions \((8k+2)\) and \((8k+6)\). The twist is by a rank two real oriented vector bundle. The main idea is to use identities for modular forms, expand formally in Fourier modes and match coefficients. In the last section, a more general cancellation formula is established for any even dimensional Riemannian manifold using the same prescription.