4-manifolds and topological modular forms

Understand

We build a connection between topology of smooth 4-manifolds and the theory of topological modular forms by considering topologically twisted compactification of 6d (1,0) theories on 4-manifolds with flavor symmetry backgrounds.

• The effective 2d theory has (0,1) supersymmetry and, possibly, a residual flavor symmetry.
• The equivariant topological Witten genus of this 2d theory then produces a new invariant of the 4-manifold equipped with a principle bundle, valued in the ring of equivariant weakly holomorphic (topological) modular forms.
• We describe basic properties of this map and present a few simple examples.