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.

24 pages, added discussion on CP invariance, reference added

References in corpus (2)

• On the trace anomaly of a Weyl fermion
• Weyl Anomalies of Four Dimensional Conformal Boundaries and Defects

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 ${\gamma }_{\ast }$