Staggered Fermions with Chiral Anomaly Cancellation

Lattice proposals for a nonperturbative formulation of the Standard Model easily lead to a global U(1) symmetry corresponding to exactly conserved fermion number. The absence of an anomaly in the fermion current would then appear to inhibit anomalous processes, such as electroweak baryogenesis in the early universe. One way to circumvent this problem is to formulate the theory such that this U(1) symmetry is explicitly broken. However we argue that in the framework of spectra...

We give a perturbative proof that U(1) lattice gauge theories generate the axial anomaly in the continuum limit under very general conditions on the lattice Dirac operator. These conditions are locality, gauge covariance and the absense of species doubling. They hold for Wilson fermions as well as for realizations of the Dirac operator that satisfy the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. The proof is based on the lattice power counting theorem. The results generalize to non-abelian gau...

This write-up starts by introducing lattice chirality to people possessing a fairly modern mathematical background, but little prior knowledge about modern physics. I then proceed to present two new and speculative ideas.

A model for lattice fermion is proposed which is, (i) free from doublers, (ii) hermitian, and (iii) chirally invariant. The price paid is the loss of hypercubic and reflection symmetries in the lattice action. Thanks to the $\epsilon$-prescription, correlation functions are free from the ill effects due to the loss of these symmetries. In weak coupling approximation, the U(1) vector current of a gauge theory of lattice fermion in this model is conserved in the continuum limit...

I review some of the difficulties associated with chiral symmetry in the context of a lattice regulator. I discuss the structure of Wilson Fermions when the hopping parameter is in the vicinity of its critical value. Here one flavor contrasts sharply with the case of more, where a residual chiral symmetry survives anomalies. I briefly discuss the surface mode approach, the use of mirror Fermions to cancel anomalies, and finally speculate on the problems with lattice versions ...

We study a lattice field theory described by two flavors of massless staggered fermions interacting with U(1) gauge fields in the strong coupling limit. We show that the lattice model has a $SU(2)\times SU(2)\times U(1)$ chiral symmetry and can be used to model the two-flavor QCD chiral phase transition in the absence of the anomaly. It is also possible to add a coupling to this model which breaks the chiral symmetry to $SU(2)\times SU(2)$ and thus mimics the effects of the a...

Dirac fermions coupled to gauge fields can exhibit the chiral anomaly even on a finite spatial lattice. A careful description of this phenomenon yields new insights into the nature of spin-charge relations and on-site symmetries (symmetries that are gauged by placing gauge fields on all links of the lattice). One notable result is that only sufficiently small symmetry groups can act on-site in a system with finitely many degrees of freedom. Symmetries that break this rule eit...

Charge conjugation (C), mirror reflection (R), and time reversal (T) symmetries, along with internal symmetries, are essential for massless Majorana and Dirac fermions. These symmetries are sufficient to rule out potential fermion bilinear mass terms, thereby establishing a gapless free fermion fixed point phase, pivotal for symmetric mass generation (SMG) transition. In this work, we systematically study the anomaly of C-R-T-internal symmetry in all spacetime dimensions by a...

Using the method of finite differences a scheme is proposed to solve exactly the Klein-Gordon and Dirac free field equations, in a (1+1)-dimensional lattice. The hamiltonian of the Dirac field is translational invariant, hermitian, avoids fermion doubling, and, for the massless case, preserves global chiral symmetry. Coupling the fermion field to the electromagnetic vector potential we construct a gauge invariant vector current leading to the correct axial anomaly.

We present a derivation of the recently discovered duality between the free massless (2+1)-dimensional Dirac fermion and QED$_3$. Our derivation is based on a regularized lattice model of the Dirac fermion and is similar to the more familiar derivation of the boson-vortex duality. It also highlights the important role played by the parity anomaly, which is somewhat less obvious in other discussions of this duality in the literature.