Related papers: Axial gravity, massless fermions and trace anomali…

We calculate the trace anomaly of a Weyl fermion coupled to gravity by using Fujikawa's method supplemented by the choice of a consistent regulator. The latter is constructed out of Pauli-Villars regulating fields. The motivation for…

We consider a Dirac fermion in a metric-axial-tensor (MAT) background. By regulating it with Pauli-Villars fields we analyze and compute its full anomaly structure. Appropriate limits of the MAT background allows to recover the anomalies of…

This is a review of some elementary properties of Dirac, Weyl and Majorana spinors in 4d. We focus in particular on the differences between massless Dirac and Majorana fermions, on one side, and Weyl fermions, on the other. We review in…

We study the trace anomaly of a Weyl fermion in an abelian gauge background. Although the presence of the chiral anomaly implies a breakdown of gauge invariance, we find that the trace anomaly can be cast in a gauge invariant form. In…

Anomalous parity violation in four dimensions would be significant for phenomenology (baryogenesis, gravitational waves) and mathematical physics. Over the past decade, there has been a controversy in the literature as to whether free Weyl…

This note is a comment on some recent papers that have raised a controversy about the existence of the odd-parity trace anomaly in a four-dimensional theory of Weyl fermions. Without going into too technical details we explain why the…

In a theory of a Dirac fermion field coupled to a metric-axial-tensor (MAT) background, using a Schwinger-DeWitt heat kernel technique, we compute non-perturbatively the two (odd parity) trace anomalies. A suitable collapsing limit of this…

We study the trace and chiral anomalies of Weyl fermions in a non-abelian gauge background in four dimensions. Using a Pauli-Villars regularization we identify the trace anomaly, proving that it can be cast in a gauge invariant form, even…

In this paper, we study the problem of trace anomaly for a chiral fermion. To find whether there exists a parity-odd term (Pontryagin term), we use a modified Breitenlohner-Maison-'t Hooft-Veltman regularization and Fujikawa's method by a…

We revisit the computation of the trace anomaly for Weyl fermions using dimensional regularization. For a consistent treatment of the chiral gamma matrix $\gamma_*$ in dimensional regularization, we work in $n$ dimensions from the very…

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…

We review recent discussions regarding the parity-odd contribution to the trace anomaly of a chiral fermion. We pay special attention to the perturbative approach in terms of Feynman diagrams, comparing in detail the results obtained using…

Weyl semimetals are materials where electrons behave effectively as a kind of massless relativistic particles known asWeyl fermions. These particles occur in two flavours, or chiralities, and are subject to quantum anomalies, the breaking…

We revisit the conformal anomaly for a Weyl fermion in four dimensions that has generated some debate recently. We employ a perturbative expansion for the metric around Minkowski space, dimensional regularization and a Breitenlohner--Maison…

We consider theories with gauged chiral fermions in which there are abelian anomalies, and no nonabelian anomalies (but there may be nonabelian gauge fields present). We construct an associated theory that is gauge-invariant,…

We explore the trace (Weyl) anomaly within a general metric-affine geometry that includes both torsion and nonmetricity. Using the Heat Kernel method and Seeley's algorithm, we compute the Minakshisundaram coefficients for arbitrary…

We show that Weyl semimetals exhibit a mixed axial-torsional anomaly in the presence of axial torsion, a concept exclusive of these materials with no known natural fundamental interpretation in terms of the geometry of spacetime. This…

Regularization of quantum field theories introduces a mass scale which breaks axial rotational and scaling invariances. We demonstrate from first principles that axial torsion and torsion trace modes have non-transverse vacuum polarization…

We derive the quantum kinetic theory for fermions with arbitrary mass in a background electromagnetic field from the Wigner-function approach. Since spin of massive fermions is a dynamical degree of freedom, the kinetic equations with the…

We study the coupling of a 2+1 dimensional non-relativistic spin 1/2 fermion to a curved Newton-Cartan geometry, using null reduction from an extra-dimensional relativistic Dirac action in curved spacetime. We analyze Weyl invariance in…