Eur. Phys. J. C (2020) 80: 276
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-7782-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Axial gravity and anomalies of fermions

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica ed Astronomia, Università di Bologna and INFN, Sezione di Bologna, via Irnerio 46, 40126, Bologna, Italy
² Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut), Am Mühlenberg 1, 14476, Golm, Germany

^* e-mail: bastianelli@bo.infn.it

Received: 8 November 2019
Accepted: 26 February 2020
Published online: 27 March 2020

Abstract

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 Dirac and Weyl fermions in the usual curved spacetime, obtaining in particular the trace anomaly of a chiral fermion, which has been the object of recent analyses.