Locally covariant chiral fermions and anomalies

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for defining chiral fermions in curved spacetime, enabling direct computation of anomalies without weak field assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a locally covariant approach to chiral fermions, allowing anomaly calculations on non-compact Lorentzian manifolds.

Findings

Explicit computation of chiral anomalies in curved backgrounds

Framework applicable to non-compact Lorentzian spacetimes

Avoids weak field approximation in anomaly calculations

Abstract

We define chiral fermions in the presence of non-trivial gravitational and gauge background fields in the framework of locally covariant field theory. This allows to straightforwardly compute the chiral anomalies on non-compact Lorentzian space-times, without recourse to a weak field approximation.