Electromagnetic duality anomaly in curved spacetimes

Abstract

The source-free Maxwell action is invariant under electric-magnetic duality rotations in arbitrary spacetimes. This leads to a conserved classical Noether charge. We show that this conservation law is broken at the quantum level in presence of a background classical gravitational field with a non-trivial Chern-Pontryagin invariant, in a parallel way to the chiral anomaly for massless Dirac fermions. Among the physical consequences, the net polarization of the quantum electromagnetic field is not conserved.

arXiv comment5 pages. Typos corrected. Some points clarified. To appear in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (3)

• Second Order Scalar Invariants of the Riemann Tensor: Applications to Black Hole Spacetimes
• Faddeev-Jackiw quantization and the path integral
• Electric-magnetic duality and renormalization in curved spacetimes

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