Anomaly flow and anomaly cancellation

Abstract

In gauge theory on 5D orbifolds the magnitude of chiral anomalies of 4D gauge fields changes with the value of the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) phase $θ_H$ in the fifth dimension. Anomaly flows with the AB phase. In particular in the Randall-Sundrum (RS) warped space gauge couplings of 4D fermions depend on bulk mass parameters of 5D fermion multiplets. We show that in the GUT-inspired $SO(5) \times U(1) \times SU(3)$ gauge-Higgs unification model in the RS warped space the total anomalies including contributions of all Kaluza-Klein excited modes of fermions become universal, being independent of the values of the bulk mass parameters of fermions and expressed in terms of the values of $W$ and $Z$ wave functions at the ultraviolet and infrared branes in the RS space. It is shown that cancellation of gauge anomalies is achieved in each generation even for $θ_H \not= 0$.