A new, adiabatic phase choice is adopted for the overlap in the case of an
infinite volume, noncompact abelian chiral gauge theory. This gauge choice
obeys the same symmetries as the Brillouin-Wigner (BW) phase choice, and, in
addition, produces a Wess-Zumino functional that is linear in the gauge
variables on the lattice. As a result, there are no gauge violations on the
trivial orbit in all theories, consistent and covariant anomalies are simply
related and Berry's curvature now appears as a Schwinger term. The adiabatic
phase choice can be further improved to produce a perfect phase choice, with a
lattice Wess-Zumino functional that is just as simple as the one in continuum.
When perturbative anomalies cancel, gauge invariance in the fermionic sector is
fully restored. The lattice effective action describing an anomalous abelian
gauge theory has an explicit form, close to one analyzed in the past in a
perturbative continuum framework.Comment: 35 pages, one figure, plain TeX; minor typos corrected; to appear in
PR
