Trace anomaly for non-relativistic fermions

Abstract We study the coupling of a 2 + 1 dimensional non-relativistic spin 1/2 fermion to a curved Newton-Cartan geometry, using null reduction from an extra-dimensional relativistic Dirac action in curved spacetime. We analyze Weyl invariance in detail: we show that at the classical level it is pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of High Energy Physics
Main Authors: Roberto Auzzi, Stefano Baiguera, Giuseppe Nardelli
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2017-08-01
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP08(2017)042
Description
Summary:Abstract We study the coupling of a 2 + 1 dimensional non-relativistic spin 1/2 fermion to a curved Newton-Cartan geometry, using null reduction from an extra-dimensional relativistic Dirac action in curved spacetime. We analyze Weyl invariance in detail: we show that at the classical level it is preserved in an arbitrary curved background, whereas at the quantum level it is broken by anomalies. We compute the trace anomaly using the Heat Kernel method and we show that the anomaly coefficients a, c are proportional to the relativistic ones for a Dirac fermion in 3 + 1 dimensions. As for the previously studied scalar case, these coefficents are proportional to 1/m, where m is the non-relativistic mass of the particle.
ISSN:1029-8479