Chiral anomaly in inhomogeneous systems with nontrivial momentum space topology
We consider the chiral anomaly for systems with a wide class of Hermitian Dirac operators Q in 4D Euclidean spacetime. We suppose that Q is not necessarily linear in derivatives and also that it contains a coordinate inhomogeneity unrelated to that of the external gauge field. We use the covariant Wigner-Weyl calculus (in which the Wigner transformed two point Greens function belongs to the two-index tensor representation of the gauge group) and point splitting regularization to calculate the global expression for the anomaly. The Atiyah-Singer theorem can be applied to relate the anomaly to the topological index of Q . We show that the topological index factorizes (under certain assumptions) into the topological invariant 1 8 π 2 ∫ tr ( F ∧ F ) (composed of the gauge field strength) multiplied by a topological invariant N 3 in phase space. The latter is responsible for the topological stability of Fermi points/Fermi surfaces and is related to the conductivity of the chiral separation effect.
Authors
- M. A. Zubkov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0727-4496)
- Praveen D. Xavier (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7930-5664)
Institutions
- Ariel University (IL)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physics Letters B
- Published
- 2025-11-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2025.140021
- Primary Topic
- Topological Materials and Phenomena
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00