Cobordism Utopia: U-Dualities, Bordisms, and the Swampland

Abstract

The U-dualities of maximally supersymmetric supergravity theories lead to celebrated non-perturbative constraints on the structure of quantum gravity. They can also lead to the presence of global symmetries since manifolds equipped with non-trivial duality bundles can carry topological charges captured by non-trivial elements of bordism groups. The recently proposed Swampland Cobordism Conjecture thus predicts the existence of new singular objects absent in the low-energy supergravity theory, which break these global symmetries. We investigate this expectation in two directions, involving the different choices of U-duality groups $G_U$, as well as $k$, the dimension of the closed manifold carrying the topological charge. First, we compute for all supergravity theories in dimension $3 \leq D \leq 11$ the bordism groups $\Omega_1^{\text{Spin}}(BG_U)$. Second, we treat in detail the case of $D = 8$, computing all relevant bordism groups $\Omega_k^{\text{Spin}}(BG_U)$ for $1 \leq k \leq 7$. In all cases, we identify corresponding string, M-, or F-theory backgrounds which implement the required U-duality defects. In particular, we find that in some cases there is no purely geometric background available which implements the required symmetry-breaking defect. This includes non-geometric twists as well as non-geometric strings and instantons. This computation involves several novel computations of the bordism groups for $G_U = \mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{Z}) \times \mathrm{SL}(3,\mathbb{Z})$, which localizes at primes $p=2,3$. Whereas an amalgamated product structure greatly simplifies the calculation of purely $\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{Z})$ bundles, this does not extend to $\mathrm{SL}(3,\mathbb{Z})$. Rather, we leverage the appearance of product / ring structures induced from cyclic subgroups of $G_U$ which naturally act on the relevant bordism groups.