Universality of the Axial Anomaly in Lattice QCD

Abstract

We prove that lattice QCD generates the axial anomaly in the continuum limit under very general conditions on the lattice action, which includes the case of Ginsparg-Wilson fermions. The ingredients going into the proof are gauge invariance, locality of the Dirac operator, absence of fermion doubling, the general form of the lattice Ward identity, and the power counting theorem of Reisz. The results generalize in an obvious way to SU(N) lattice gauge theories.