Nonperturbative Chiral Anomaly Cancellation and Irrelevant Operators

Abstract

The Chiral anomaly cancellation is perturbatively well understood but its nonperturbative validity in presence of a lattice has remained unproven. We provide a rigorous nonperturbative proof of anomaly cancellation and its universality in a variation of the lattice Kogut-Susskind regularization for the multiflavor Sommerfield model, describing Dirac fermions interacting with a non-compact $\mathrm{U}(1)$ quantum vector field. We identify a novel and general mechanism based on the convergence properties of the renormalized expansion and related to the one leading to universality in topological insulators. Irrelevant lattice operators, despite being suppressed along the RG flow, provide essential contributions to the anomaly cancellation.