Gravity-gauge Anomaly Constraints on the Energy-momentum Tensor

Abstract

We derive constraints on the four dimensional energy-momentum tensor from gravitational and gauge anomalies. Our work can be considered an extension of Duff's analysis [1] to include parity-odd terms and explicit symmetry breaking. The constraints imply the absence of the parity-odd $R\tilde R$ and $F\tilde F$ terms, for theories whose symmetries are compatible with dimensional regularisation, in a model-independent way. Remarkably, even in the case of explicit symmetry breaking the $\Box R$-anomaly is found to be finite and unambiguous after applying the symmetry constraints. We compute mixed gravity-gauge anomalies at leading order and deduce phenomenological consequences for vector bosons associated with global chiral symmetries.