Translational anomaly of chiral fermions in two dimensions
High Energy Physics - Theory
2019-05-20 v1
Abstract
It is well known that a quantized two-dimensional Weyl fermion coupled to gravity spoils general covariance and breaks the covariant conservation of the energy-momentum tensor. In this brief article, we point out that the quantum conservation of the momentum can also fail in flat spacetime, provided the Weyl fermion is coupled to a time-varying homogeneous electric field. This signals a quantum anomaly of the space-translation symmetry, which has not been highlighted in the literature so far.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.06735,
title = {Translational anomaly of chiral fermions in two dimensions},
author = {Pau Beltrán-Palau and Jose Navarro-Salas and Silvia Pla},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.06735},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Latex file, 5 pages, 1 figure. To appear in Phys. Rev. D