Parity anomaly in four dimensions

Abstract

In an analogy to the odd-dimensional case we define the parity anomaly as the part of the one-loop effective action for fermions associated with spectral asymmetry of the Dirac operator. This quantity is computed directly on four-dimensional manifolds with boundary and related to the Chern-Simons current on the boundary. Despite a quite unusual Chern-Simons level obtained, the action is gauge invariant and passes all consistency checks.