Dimensional Reduction of Cobordism and K-theory

Abstract

It has been proposed that cobordism and K-theory groups, which can be mathematically related in certain cases, are physically associated to generalised higher-form symmetries. As a consequence, they should be broken or gauged in any consistent theory of quantum gravity, in accordance with swampland conjectures. We provide further support to this idea by showing that cobordism and K-theory groups of a general manifold X reproduce the pattern of symmetries expected from the dimensional reduction of the theory on X, as well as their breaking and gauging. To this end, we employ the Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence to compute such groups for common choices of X in string compactifications.