The Axial Anomaly in Lorentz Violating Theories: Towards the Electromagnetic Response of Weakly Tilted Weyl Semimetals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the axial anomaly in Lorentz-violating theories, specifically in weakly tilted Weyl semimetals, showing the anomaly's form remains unaffected by tilting parameters and discussing implications for electromagnetic responses.

Contribution

It extends the calculation of abelian chiral anomalies to Lorentz-violating Weyl semimetals, revealing the anomaly's invariance under tilting and clarifying the regularization process.

Findings

Anomaly remains covariant despite tilting.

Regularization recovers gauge invariance.

Anomaly value is not directly linked to electromagnetic response.

Abstract

Using the path integral formulation in Euclidean space, we extended the calculation of the abelian chiral anomalies in the case of Lorentz violating theories by considering a new fermionic correction term provided by the standard model extension, which arises in the continuous Hamiltonian of a weakly tilted Weyl semimetal, and whose cones have opposite tilting. We found that this anomaly is insensitive to the tilting parameter, retaining its well-known covariant form. This independence on the Lorentz violating parameters is consistent with other findings reported in the literature. The initially imposed gauge invariant regularization was consistently recovered at the end of the calculation by the appearance of highly non-trivial combinations of the covariant derivatives, which ultimately managed to give only terms containing the electromagnetic tensor. We emphasize that the value of the anomaly with an arbitrary parameter is not automatically related to the effective action describing the electromagnetic response of such materials