Mixed gauge-gravity term and proper time

Abstract

We consider the four-dimensional action of spinors minimally coupled to a $U(1)$-gauge field in an Riemann-Cartan background. In this theory, we integrate over the spinors and study the resulting one-loop gauge-gravity effective action, paying special attention to the contributions that depend on both the gauge field and the torsion. We explicitly calculate the gauge-torsion term, which turns out to be finite, and comment on possible terms depending simultaneously on torsion, curvature, and gauge field.