Surface states and chiral symmetry on the lattice

Abstract

In a Hamiltonian formalism we study chiral symmetry for lattice Fermions formulated in terms of Shockley surface states bound to a wall in an extra spatial dimension. For hadronic physics this provides a natural scheme for taking quark masses to zero without requiring a precise tuning of parameters. We illustrate the chiral anomaly as a flow of states in this extra dimension. We discuss two alternatives for extending the picture to a chiral coupling of gauge fields to such Fermions; one with a small explicit breaking of gauge symmetry and one one with heavy mirror Fermions.