Chiral Invariance and Species Doublers in Generic Fermion Models on the Lattice

Abstract

Discussions are made on the structures of chirally invariant lattice actions without any restriction of hermiticity. With the help of the Ward-Takahashi identity a general conclusion can be derived that there must be species doublers in any chirally invariant model provided that the model is chosen as well-regularized, that is, there is no singularity in the propagator after introducing fermion mass on the lattice. Various examples are discussed to pick up better models defined in the sense that the number of species doubler is smaller than that of the naive Dirac action.