The thermal chiral anomaly in the Schwinger model

Abstract

In the Schwinger model at finite temperature, we derive a closed form result for the chiral anomaly which arises from the long distance behavior of the electric field \cite{frenkel}. We discuss the general properties associated with this thermal anomaly as well as its relation with the "index" of the Dirac operator. We further show that the thermal anomaly, like the zero temperature anomaly which arises from the ultraviolet behavior of the theory, does not receive any contribution from higher loops. Finally, we determine the complete effective action as well as the anomaly functional on both the thermal branches in the closed time path formalism.