Trace anomaly of Weyl fermions in the Breitenlohner--Maison scheme for ${\gamma }_{\ast }$

Abstract

We revisit the conformal anomaly for a Weyl fermion in four dimensions that has generated some debate recently. We employ a perturbative expansion for the metric around Minkowski space, dimensional regularization and a Breitenlohner--Maison prescription for the chiral $\gamma$ matrix. We obtain a vanishing odd-parity contribution for Weyl fermions in four dimensions, while the even-parity contribution is exactly half the one for a Dirac fermion.

v2 contains a note with additional references/comments added after the publication of the proceedings. 8 pages, 2 figures, contribution to The European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP2021)

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