On the gauge invariant path-integral measure for the overlap Weyl fermions in $\underline{16}$ of SO(10)

TL;DR

This paper develops a gauge-invariant lattice measure for SO(10) chiral Weyl fermions using overlap fermions, addressing topological sectors, symmetry properties, and relations to other models, with potential for numerical studies.

Contribution

It introduces a gauge-invariant path-integral measure for SO(10) Weyl fermions on the lattice, incorporating 't Hooft vertices and analyzing its properties and relations to existing approaches.

Findings

Measure is gauge-invariant and valid across topological sectors.

The induced effective action is CP invariant.

The measure exhibits the expected anomaly and symmetry-breaking features.

Abstract

We consider the lattice formulation of SO(10) chiral gauge theory with left-handed Weyl fermions in the sixteen dimensional spinor representation ($\underline{16}$) within the framework of the Overlap fermion/the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. We define a manifestly gauge-invariant path-integral measure for the left-handed Weyl field using all the components of the Dirac field, but the right-handed part of which is just saturated completely by inserting a suitable product of the SO(10)-invariant 't Hooft vertices in terms of the right-handed field. The definition of the measure applies to all possible topological sectors. The measure possesses all required transformation properties under lattice symmetries and the induced effective action is CP invariant. The global U(1) symmetry of the left-handed field is anomalous due to the non-trivial transformation of the measure, while that of the right-handed field is explicitly broken by the 't Hooft vertices. There remains the issue of locality in the gauge-field dependence of the Weyl fermion measure, but the question can be addressed in the weak gauge-coupling expansion at least using Monte Carlo methods without encountering the sign problem. We also discuss the relations of our formulation to other approaches/proposals to decouple the species-doubling/mirror degrees of freedom. Those include Eichten-Preskill model, Ginsparg-Wilson Mirror-fermion model, Domain wall fermion model with the boundary Eichten-Preskill term, 4D Topological Insulator/Superconductor with gapped boundary phase, and the recent studies on the PMS phase/"Mass without symmetry breaking". We clarify the similarity and the difference in technical detail and show that our proposal is a well-defined testing ground for that basic question.