Some of the talks at Strings 2015 have now appeared online, and one of them I found quite fascinating, Witten’s Anomalies Revisited. Some of his motivation comes from string perturbation theory and M-theory, but the questions he addresses are fundamental, deep questions about quantum field theory (and not just any quantum field theory, but exactly the sort of qft that appears in the SM, spinors chirally-coupled to gauge-fields/metrics).
The fundamental issue is that these are theories where the path integral does not determine the phase of the partition function. Part of story here is the well-known story of anomalies, perturbative and global. One interesting point Witten makes is that vanishing of these anomalies is not sufficient to be able to consistently choose the phase of the partition function, and he gives a conjecture for a necessary condition that is stronger than anomaly cancellation.
The standard story of QFT textbooks is that once a Lagrangian is chosen, the corresponding QFT is well-defined. But quantization really is a lot more subtle than that, and the anomaly phenomenon is just one indication of the problem. In earlier parts of my career I spent a lot of time thinking about anomalies; the connections to some of the deepest mathematics around (K-theory, index theory and much more) are truly remarkable. In recent years I’ve been thinking about other things, but Witten’s talk is a strong encouragement to go back and revisit the anomaly story (some of his best work has “revisited” in the title…)
In particular, Witten emphasizes a particular case I’d never paid much attention to: the 3d massless Majorana fermion. One would think that this is among the simplest quantum field theories around, but Witten explains how this is an example of a theory with a potential inconsistency (no way to consistently choose the sign of the partition function), even when the anomaly vanishes. This theory also appears in a hot topic in condensed matter physics, the theory of topological superconductors. One reference Witten gives to related work is to this recent paper (there’s a typo in his reference, should be 1406.7329 not 1407.7329).
Witten ends with:
I hope I have at least succeeded today in giving an overview of the tools that are needed to study the subtle fermion integrals that frequently arise in string/M-theory. A detailed analysis of a specific problem would really require a different lecture. Write-ups of some of the problems I’ve mentioned – and some similar ones – will appear soon.
I look forward to those write-ups, with the theories he’s talking about of a lot more interest than just their role in string/M-theory calculations.