Anomalies, instantons and chiral symmetry breaking at a Lifshitz point

Abstract

We give a new twist to an old-fashioned topic in quantum field theory describing violations of the chiral charge conservation of massless fermions through Adler-Bell-Jackiw anomalies in the background of instanton fields in the context of non-relativistic Lifshitz theories. The results we report here summarize in a nut-shell our earlier work on the subject found in arXiv:1103.5693 and arXiv:1110.1332. We present simple examples where index computations can be carried out explicitly focusing, in particular, to gravitational models of Lifshitz type and highlight their differences from ordinary gravity in four space-time dimensions.