Trace Anomaly of Weyl Fermions via the Path Integral

Abstract

We compute the trace, diffeomorphism and Lorentz anomalies of a free Weyl fermion in a gravitational background field by path integral methods. This is achieved by regularising the variation of the determinant of the Weyl operator building on earlier work by Leutwyler. The trace anomaly is found to be one half of the one of a Dirac fermion. Most importantly we establish that the potential parity-odd curvature term $R\tilde{R}$, corresponding to the Pontryagin density, vanishes. This is to the contrary of some recent findings in the literature which gave rise to a controversy. We verify, that the regularisation does not lead to (spurious) anomalies in the Lorentz and diffeomorphism symmetries. We argue that in $d=2(\text{mod }4)$ $P$- and $CP$-odd terms cannot appear and that for $d=4(\text{mod }4)$ they are absent at least at leading order.

22 pages

References in corpus (9)

• Trace anomalies in chiral theories revisited
• On the trace anomaly of a Weyl fermion
• Trace Anomaly of Weyl Fermions via the Path Integral
• Anomalies from an effective field theory perspective
• Investigation of Pontryagin trace anomaly using Pauli-Villars regularization
• Elusive anomalies
• The Universal One-Loop Effective Action with Gravity
• Chiral current induced by torsional Weyl anomaly
• Algebraic Properties of Riemannian Manifolds

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Trace Anomaly of Weyl Fermions via the Path Integral
• Universal definition of the non-conformal trace anomaly
• Interactions of the scalaron dark matter in $f(R)$ gravity
• Effective scalaron--photon interaction in $f(R)$ gravity
• The Weyl anomaly in interacting quantum field theory on curved spacetimes