Varieties of four-dimensional gauge theories

Abstract

Abstract We use algebraic geometry to study the anomaly-free representations of an arbitrary gauge Lie algebra for 4-dimensional spacetime fermions. For irreducible representations, the problem reduces to studying the Lie algebras 𝔰𝔲 n for n ≥ 3. We show that there exist equivalence classes of such representations that are in bijection with the rational points on a projective variety that are dense in a region on the underlying real variety diffeomorphic to ℝ n−3. It follows that the chiral ones overwhelm the non-chiral ones for n ≥ 5. We present an efficient algorithm to find explicit anomaly-free irreducible representations and discuss the generalization to reducible representations.