The Chiral Anomaly in SCET

Abstract

Anomalies are an infrared effect, but are often realized in effective theories in a non-trivial way. We study the chiral anomaly in Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET), where the anomaly equation has terms contributing at different orders in the power expansion. The chiral anomaly equations in SCET are computed up to NNLO in the power counting with external collinear and/or ultrasoft gluons. We do this by expanding the QCD anomaly equation, using the tree level (LO in α_s) relations between QCD and SCET fields. The validity of this correspondence between the anomaly equations is confirmed by direct computation of the one-loop diagrams in SCET.

16 pages, 6 figures