Speaker
Description
Type IIB supergravity famously has a discrete duality group,
which is an exact symmetry of the full type IIB string theory. This
symmetry has potential quantum anomalies, which could render the theory
inconsistent. In this talk I will describe how we computed these
anomalies in recent work, and show they are nonvanishing, but
remarkably, they can be cancelled by a subtle modification of the IIB
Chern-Simons term in what amounts to a new variant of the Green-Schwarz
mechanism. This can only happen because of some "miraculous
cancellations" that depend on the details of the IIB supergravity
spectrum. I will also describe alternative ways to cancel this anomaly,
presenting variant versions of IIB string theory which have the same IIB
supergravity as the low-energy limit, but which differ at the
nonperturbative level. These theories may or may not be in the
Swampland.
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