Trace anomaly of weyl fermions via the path integral

Rémy Larue*, Jérémie Quevillon, Roman Zwicky

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

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 RR~ , 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 (mod 4) P- and CP-odd terms cannot appear and that for d = 4 (mod 4) they are absent at least at leading order.

Original languageEnglish
Article number64
Pages (from-to)1-21
Number of pages21
Journal Journal of High Energy Physics
Volume2023
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Dec 2023

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Anomalies in Field and String Theories
  • Scale and Conformal Symmetries
  • Space-Time Symmetries

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Trace anomaly of weyl fermions via the path integral'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this