Lorentz symmetry violation in the fermion number anomaly with the chiral overlap operator

Abstract

Recently, Grabowska and Kaplan proposed a four-dimensional lattice formulation of chiral gauge theories on the basis of a chiral overlap operator. We compute the classical continuum limit of the fermion number anomaly in this formulation. Unexpectedly, we find that the continuum limit contains a term which is not Lorentz invariant. The term is, however, proportional to the gauge anomaly coefficient, and thus the fermion number anomaly in this lattice formulation automatically restores the Lorentz-invariant form when and only when the anomaly cancellation condition is met.