Anomalous Lorentz and CPT violation

Abstract

If there exists Lorentz and CPT violation in nature, then it is crucial to discover and understand the underlying mechanism. In this contribution, we discuss one such mechanism which relies on four-dimensional chiral gauge theories defined over a spacetime manifold with topology $\mathbb{R}^3 \times S^1$ and periodic spin structure for the compact dimension. It can be shown that the effective gauge-field action contains a local Chern-Simons-like term which violates Lorentz and CPT invariance. For arbitrary Abelian $U(1)$ gauge fields with trivial holonomies in the compact direction, this anomalous Lorentz and CPT violation has recently been established perturbatively with a Pauli-Villars-type regularization and nonperturbatively with a lattice regularization based on Ginsparg-Wilson fermions.