The secret gauging of flavor symmetries in noncommutative QFT Original Research Article

We show that flavor ʹt Hooft anomalies automatically vanish in noncommutative field theories which are obtained from string theory in the decoupling limit. We claim that this is because the flavor symmetries are secretly local, because of coupling to closed string bulk modes. An example is the SU(4) R-symmetry of N=4 D=4 NCSYM. The gauge fields, along with all closed string bulk modes, are not on-shell external states but do appear as off-shell intermediate states in nonplanar processes; these closed string modes are thereby holographically encoded in the NCFT.