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Recently, I saw a construction of topological invariant for $pi_3(U(n))$ with $ngeq 2$ : $$ N=frac{1}{24pi^2}int_{S^3} d^3x epsilon^{ijk} Tr[(U^{-1}partial_{x_i}U)(U^{-1}partial_{x_j}U)(U^{-1}partial_{x_k}U)] , $$ where $Uin U(n)$ depends on $boldsymbol{x}=(x_1,x_2,x_3)in S^3$ , $epsilon^{ijk}$ is the Levi-Civita symbol, $i,j,k=1,2,3$ , and the duplicated indexes are summed over. It is claimed that $N$ is an integer, but why? Update 02/02/2019 I think I got an argument for $n=2$ . In this case, $U=e^{i varphi} q$ with $qin SU(2)$ . Due to the trace and the Levi-Civita symbol in $N$ , $varphi$ does not contribute to $N$ . As $Tr[q^{dagger}partial_i q]=0$ and $(q^{dagger}partial_i q)^{dagger}=-q^{dagger}partial_i q$ , $q^{dagger}partial_i q$ in geneeral has the form $q^{dagger}partia
Mixing
