Chiral anomaly in inhomogeneous systems with nontrivial momentum space topology

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Abstract

We consider the chiral anomaly for systems with a wide class of Hermitian Dirac operators Q in 4D Euclidean spacetime. We suppose that Q is not necessarily linear in derivatives and also that it contains a coordinate inhomogeneity unrelated to that of the external gauge field. We use the covariant Wigner-Weyl calculus (in which the Wigner transformed two point Greens function belongs to the two-index tensor representation of the gauge group) and point splitting regularization to calculate the global expression for the anomaly. The Atiyah-Singer theorem can be applied to relate the anomaly to the topological index of Q . We show that the topological index factorizes (under certain assumptions) into the topological invariant 18π2∫tr(F∧F) (composed of the gauge field strength) multiplied by a topological invariant N 3 in phase space. The latter is responsible for the topological stability of Fermi points/Fermi surfaces and is related to the conductivity of the chiral separation effect.

Original languageEnglish
Article number140021
JournalPhysics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics
Volume871
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2025

Keywords

  • Atiyah - Singer theorem
  • Chiral anomaly
  • Momentum space topology
  • Point splitting regularization
  • Wigner - Weyl calculus

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