Résumé |
In recent years, a new class of physical systems have been unearthed admitting
quasiparticle excitations that are unable to move freely in space, known as
fractons. In the continuum limit, these systems give rise to quantum field
theories featuring exotic symmetries such as conserved dipole or multipole
moments. Despite immense efforts over the past few years, the nature of these new
quantum field theories still remains elusive to us. Hoping to add to these
efforts, in this talk we will consider fracton field theories in curved spacetime.
In addition to being interesting in their own right, coupling fractons to
background spacetime sources allows us to unambiguously obtain the spacetime
Noether currents (associated with conserved energy and momentum) and their
transformation properties under the dipole (multipole) symmetry transformations.
As an interesting aside, we find evidence for a mixed gauge-gravitational anomaly
in the symmetric tensor gauge theory which naturally couples to conserved dipoles.
The talk is based on a recent paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.03973.pdf. |