Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We investigate the fate of the Standard Model (SM) ℤ61 electric 1-form global symmetry in the background of gravitational instantons, focusing on Eguchi-Hanson (EH) geometries. We show that EH instantons support quantized ℤ61 fluxes localized on their S2 bolt, inducing fractional topological charge without backreacting on the geometry. The requirement that quark and lepton wavefunctions be globally well-defined under parallel transport imposes boundary conditions, removing ill-defined fermion zero modes; the surviving spectrum is confirmed by an explicit solution of the Dirac equation and by the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer index theorem. The Euclidean path integral in the EH background can be interpreted as a transition amplitude from an entangled state between two identical halves of space to the vacuum. Summing over all ℤ61 flux sectors in the path integral gauges the SM 1-form symmetry; thus, it cannot persist as an exact global symmetry in the semiclassical limit of gravity. We further show that these fluxes induce baryon- and lepton-number violating processes, which are exponentially suppressed due to the smallness of the hypercharge coupling constant.
Author: Anber, Mohamed M.
Institution: Durham University
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7133340073
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