Axial Anomaly in the Presence of the Aharonov-Bohm Gauge Field

We investigate on the plane the axial anomaly for euclidean Dirac fermions in the presence of a background Aharonov--Bohm gauge potential. The non perturbative analysis depends on the self--adjoint extensions of the Dirac operator and the result is shown to be influenced by the actual way of understanding the local axial current. The role of the quantum mechanical parameters involved in the expression for the axial anomaly is discussed. A derivation of the effective action by means of the stereographic projection is also considered.Comment: 15 pages, Plain.TeX, Preprint DFUB/94 - 1

Parity Breaking Medium and Squeeze Operators

The transition between a Minkowski space region and a parity breaking medium domain is thoroughly discussed. The requirement of continuity of the field operator content across the separating boundary of the two domains leads to Bogolyubov transformations, squeezed pairs states and squeeze operators that turn out to generate a functional SU(2) algebra. According to this algebraic approach, the reflection and transmission probability amplitude across the separating boundary are computed. The probability rate of the emission or absorption of squeezed pairs out of the vacuum (generalization of the Sauter-Schwinger-Nikishov formula) is obtained.Comment: 22 pages, slightly modified, arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1109.344

Brane world generation by matter and gravity

We present a non-compact (4 + 1) dimensional model with a local strong four-fermion interaction supplementing it with gravity. In the strong coupling regime it reveals the spontaneous translational symmetry breaking which eventually leads to the formation of domain walls, or thick 3-branes, embedded in the AdS-5 manifold. To describe this phenomenon we construct the appropriate low-energy effective Action and find kink-like vacuum solutions in the quasi-flat Riemannian metric. We discuss the generation of ultra-low-energy (3 + 1) dimensional physics and we establish the relation among the bulk five dimensional gravitational constant, the brane Newton's constants and the curvature of AdS-5 space-time. The plausible relation between the compositeness scale of the scalar matter and the symmetry breaking scale is shown to support the essential decoupling of branons, the scalar fluctuations of the brane, from the Standard Model matter, supporting their possible role in the dark matter saturation. The induced cosmological constant on the brane does vanish due to exact cancellation of matter and gravity contributions.Comment: 35 pages, JHEP3 style, refs.adde

Symmetries and the cosmological constant puzzle

We outline the evaluation of the cosmological constant in the framework of the standard field-theoretical treatment of vacuum energy and discuss the relation between the vacuum energy problem and the gauge-group spontaneous symmetry breaking. We suggest possible extensions of the 't Hooft-Nobbenhuis symmetry, in particular, its complexification till duality symmetry and discuss the compatible implementation on gravity. We propose to use the discrete time-reflection transform to formulate a framework in which one can eliminate the huge contributions of vacuum energy into the effective cosmological constant and suggest that the breaking of time--reflection symmetry could be responsible for a small observable value of this constant.Comment: 11 pages, more relevant refs, refining cutoff definition of cosmological constant + eq.for regularized pressure adde

Dirac, Majorana, Weyl in 4d

This is a review of some elementary properties of Dirac, Weyl and Majorana spinors in 4d. We focus in particular on the differences between massless Dirac and Majorana fermions, on one side, and Weyl fermions, on the other. We review in detail the definition of their effective actions, when coupled to (vector and axial) gauge fields, and revisit the corresponding anomalies using the Feynman diagram method with different regularizations. Among various well known results we stress in particular the regularization independence in perturbative approaches, while not all the regularizations fit the non-perturbative ones. As for anomalies, we highlight in particular one perhaps not so well known feature: the rigid relation between chiral and trace anomalies.Comment: 38 pages, 3 figures, section 5, Appendix A and Appendix C new, several typos correcte