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Published November 2024 | Version Published
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Fate of stringy noninvertible symmetries

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Pennsylvania
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon Institute for Theoretical Physics
  • 4. ROR icon Harvard University

Abstract

Noninvertible symmetries in quantum field theory (QFT) generalize the familiar product rule of groups to a more general fusion rule. In many cases, gauged versions of these symmetries can be regarded as dual descriptions of invertible gauge symmetries. One may ask: are there any other types of noninvertible gauge symmetries? In theories with gravity we find a new form of noninvertible gauge symmetry that emerges in the limit of fundamental, tensionless strings. These stringy noninvertible gauge symmetries appear in standard examples such as non-Abelian orbifolds. Moving away from the tensionless limit always breaks these symmetries. We also find that both the conventional form of noninvertible gauge symmetries and these stringy generalizations are realized in AdS/CFT. Although generically broken, approximate noninvertible symmetries have implications for swampland constraints: in certain cases they can be used to prove the existence of towers of states related to the distance conjecture, and can sometimes explain the existence of slightly subextremal states which fill in the gaps in the sublattice weak gravity conjecture.

Copyright and License

©2024 American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank B. Rayhaun for collaborating in early stages of this project. We thank L. Bhardwaj, C.-M. Chang, C. Córdova, A. Debray, D. Delmastro, L. Eberhardt, B. Haghighat, M. Hübner, C. Murdia, J. Parra-Martinez, K. Roumpedakis, S. Seifnashri, R. Thorngren, X. Yu, and Y. Zheng for helpful discussions. The work of J. J. H. is supported by DOE (HEP) Award No. DE-SC0013528, a University Research Foundation grant at the University of Pennsylvania and by BSF Grant No. 2022100. J. M. is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DESC0011632. M. M. is supported by an Atraccion del Talento Fellowship 2022-T1/TIC-23956 from Comunidad de Madrid. The work of I. V. is also partly supported by the Grant No. RYC2019-028512-I from the MCI (Spain) and the ERC Starting Grant No. QGuide-101042568—StG 2021. M. M. and I. V. also acknowledge the support of the Grants No. CEX2020-001007-S and No. PID2021-123017NB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe. C. V. is supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (602883,CV), the DellaPietra Foundation, and by NSF Grant No. PHY-2013858. We thank the 2023 Simons Summer Workshop for hospitality. J. M., M. M., A. S. and I. V. thank ICBS Daejeon for hospitality during the “CERN-Korea workshop: Recent trends in and out of the swampland”. J. M., M. M., and I. V. thank the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY-2210452 for hospitality during the 2023 summer program “Traversing the Particle Physics Peaks—Phenomenology to Formal.” J. J. H. and J. M. thank the 2023 NYU Satellite Workshop on Global Categorical Symmetries for hospitality during part of this work. J. J. H., J. M., and A..S thank the 2023 meeting of the Simons Collaboration on Global Categorical Symmetries for hospitality during part of this work.

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Additional details

Funding

United States Department of Energy
DE-SC0013528
University of Pennsylvania
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation
2022100
Office of Science
Office of High Energy Physics
DESC0011632
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
RYC2019-028512-I
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
CEX2020-001007-S
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
PID2021-123017NB-I00
European Research Council
QGuide-101042568—StG 2021
Simons Foundation
602883
National Science Foundation
PHY-2013858
National Science Foundation
PHY-2210452
Aspen Center For Physics
DellaPietra Foundation

Dates

Accepted
2024-07-18
Accepted
Available
2024-11-04
Published online

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