Chiral fermions, dimensional regularization, and the trace anomaly

Abstract

We investigate the trace anomaly of a chiral fermion in dimensional regularization, considering in detail the simplest case of coupling to an abelian gauge field. We apply the Breitenlohner-Maison/'t Hooft-Veltman prescription for dealing with the chiral matrix ${\gamma }^5$ and verify that no parity-odd term arises in the trace anomaly. The issue treated here is analogous to that of a chiral fermion in curved spacetime, discussed in recent literature. The advantage of having a simplified background minimizes the amount of algebraic calculations and allows pinpointing better the subtle points carried by dimensional regularization.

arXiv comment24 pages, added discussion on CP invariance, reference added

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Nonlinear chiral kinetic theory
• The Weyl anomaly in interacting quantum field theory on curved spacetimes
• Trace anomaly of Weyl fermions in the Breitenlohner--Maison scheme for ${\gamma }_{\ast }$