New Anomalies, TQFTs, and Confinement in Bosonic Chiral Gauge Theories

Understand

We study a class of 4-dimensional $SU(N)$ chiral gauge theories with fermions in the 2-index symmetric and antisymmetric representations and classify their infrared phases.

• The choice $N=4\mathbb{Z}$ corresponds to gauging the fermion number and makes the theory purely bosonic.
• We examine the most general background fields of the centers of the gauge, non-abelian flavor, and $U(1)$-axial groups that can be consistently activated, thereby determine the faithful global continuous and discrete symmetries of the theory.
• This allows us to identify new mixed 0-form/1-form `t Hooft anomalies on both spin and nonspin manifolds.