Noncommutative Chiral Anomaly and the Dirac-Ginsparg-Wilson Operator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that noncommutative fuzzy spacetime structures naturally produce the axial anomaly in two dimensions, revealing novel relations between Dirac operators, gauge fields, and topological terms on the fuzzy sphere.

Contribution

It introduces a new gauge-covariant expansion of the quark propagator on the fuzzy sphere, linking noncommutative geometry with axial anomalies and topological actions.

Findings

The Dirac-Ginsparg-Wilson relation contains an edge effect corresponding to the axial anomaly.

The covariant expansion reveals a term that reproduces the canonical theta term.

The effective Dirac operator shares the same IR spectrum but differs in UV modes, with implications for anomaly calculations.

Abstract

It is shown that the local axial anomaly in $2-$dimensions emerges naturally if one postulates an underlying noncommutative fuzzy structure of spacetime . In particular the Dirac-Ginsparg-Wilson relation on ${\bf S}^2_F$ is shown to contain an edge effect which corresponds precisely to the ``fuzzy'' $U(1)_A$ axial anomaly on the fuzzy sphere . We also derive a novel gauge-covariant expansion of the quark propagator in the form $\frac{1}{{\cal D}_{AF}}=\frac{a\hat{\Gamma}^L}{2}+\frac{1}{{\cal D}_{Aa}}$ where $a=\frac{2}{2l+1}$ is the lattice spacing on ${\bf S}^2_F$, $\hat{\Gamma}^L$ is the covariant noncommutative chirality and ${\cal D}_{Aa}$ is an effective Dirac operator which has essentially the same IR spectrum as ${\cal D}_{AF}$ but differes from it on the UV modes. Most remarkably is the fact that both operators share the same limit and thus the above covariant expansion is not available in the continuum theory . The first bit in this expansion $\frac{a\hat{\Gamma}^L}{2}$ although it vanishes as it stands in the continuum limit, its contribution to the anomaly is exactly the canonical theta term. The contribution of the propagator $\frac{1}{{\cal D}_{Aa}}$ is on the other hand equal to the toplogical Chern-Simons action which in two dimensions vanishes identically .