skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 10:00 PM ET on Thursday, February 12 until 1:00 AM ET on Friday, February 13 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


Title: Undoing decomposition
In this paper we discuss gauging one-form symmetries in two-dimensional theories. The existence of a global one-form symmetry in two dimensions typically signals a violation of cluster decomposition — an issue resolved by the observation that such theories decompose into disjoint unions, a result that has been applied to, for example, Gromov–Witten theory and gauged linear sigma model phases. In this paper we describe how gauging one-form symmetries in two-dimensional theories can be used to select particular elements of that disjoint union, effectively undoing decomposition. We examine such gaugings explicitly in examples involving orbifolds, nonsupersymmetric pure Yang–Mills theories, and supersymmetric gauge theories in two dimensions. Along the way, we learn explicit concrete details of the topological configurations that path integrals sum over when gauging a one-form symmetry, and we also uncover “hidden” one-form symmetries.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1720321
PAR ID:
10147601
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Journal of Modern Physics A
Volume:
34
Issue:
35
ISSN:
0217-751X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1950233
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. A<sc>bstract</sc> In this paper we discuss gauging noninvertible zero-form symmetries in two dimensions, extending our previous work. Specifically, in this work we discuss more general gauged noninvertible symmetries in which the noninvertible symmetry is not multiplicity free, and discuss the case of Rep(A4) in detail. We realize Rep(A4) gaugings for thec= 1 CFT at the exceptional point in the moduli space and find new self-duality under gauging a certain non-group algebra object, leading to a larger noninvertible symmetry Rep(SL(2, ℤ3)). We also discuss more general examples of decomposition in two-dimensional gauge theories with trivially-acting gauged noninvertible symmetries. 
    more » « less
  2. A<sc>bstract</sc> In this paper, we discuss how gauging one-form symmetries in Chern-Simons theories is implemented in an A-twisted topological open string theory. For example, the contribution from a fixed H/Z bundle on a three-manifold M, arising in a BZ gauging of H Chern-Simons, for Z a finite subgroup of the center of H, is described by an open string worldsheet theory whose bulk is a sigma model with target a Z-gerbe (a bundle of one-form symmetries) over TM, of characteristic class determined by the H/Z bundle. We give a worldsheet picture of the decomposition of one-form-symmetry-gauged Chern-Simons in three dimensions, and we describe how a target-space constraint on bundles arising in the gauged Chern-Simons theory has a natural worldsheet realization. Our proposal provides examples of the expected correspondence between worldsheet global higher-form symmetries, and target-space gauged higher-form symmetries. 
    more » « less
  3. A bstract This paper describes a generalization of decomposition in orbifolds. In general terms, decomposition states that two-dimensional orbifolds and gauge theories whose gauge groups have trivially-acting subgroups decompose into disjoint unions of theories. However, decomposition can be, at least naively, broken in orbifolds if the orbifold has discrete torsion in the trivially-acting subgroup. (Formally, this breaks finite global one-form symmetries.) Nevertheless, even in such cases, one still sees rudiments of decomposition. In this paper, we generalize decomposition in orbifolds to include such examples of discrete torsion, which we check in numerous examples. Our analysis includes as special cases (and in one sense generalizes) quantum symmetries of abelian orbifolds. 
    more » « less
  4. A<sc>bstract</sc> In this paper, we test and extend a proposal of Gu, Pei, and Zhang for an application of decomposition to three-dimensional theories with one-form symmetries and to quantum K theory. The theories themselves do not decompose, but, OPEs of parallel one-dimensional objects (such as Wilson lines) and dimensional reductions to two dimensions do decompose, sometimes in two independent ways. We apply this to extend conjectures for quantum K theory rings of gerbes (realized by three-dimensional gauge theories with one-form symmetries) via both orbifold partition functions and gauged linear sigma models. 
    more » « less
  5. In this paper, we discuss decomposition in the context of three-dimensional Chern–Simons theories. Specifically, we argue that a Chern–Simons theory with a gauged noneffectively-acting one-form symmetry is equivalent to a disjoint union of Chern–Simons theories, with discrete theta angles coupling to the image under a Bockstein homomorphism of a canonical degree-two characteristic class. On three-manifolds with boundary, we show that the bulk discrete theta angles (coupling to bundle characteristic classes) are mapped to choices of discrete torsion in boundary orbifolds. We use this to verify that the bulk three-dimensional Chern–Simons decomposition reduces on the boundary to known decompositions of two-dimensional (WZW) orbifolds, providing a strong consistency test of our proposal. 
    more » « less