Chiral symmetry and functional integral (Q1083748)

The anomalies in the Ward identity play an important role in quantum field theories involving coupling of fermionic fields to pseudo-scalar or axial vector fields. Perturbative analyses of these anomalies and their relationship to proton decay, supersymmetries have been made by many authors. From the very outset a non-perturbative, path integral method was used also, to deal with models with chiral symmetry. \textit{Fujiwara} [Phys. Rev. Lett. 42 (1979)] pointed out that the path space measure was not invariant under the Chiral group of transformations and the associated Jacobian of transformation is responsible for the anomalous term in the Ward identity. The authors of the paper under review investigate the use of functional integration technique in theories where Fujiwara's technique yields results at variance with perturbational calculations. This is done by using a generalization of the zeta function to arbitrary elliptic operators on a compact n-manifold, an idea essentially due to \textit{S. W. Hawking} [Commun. Math. Phys. 55, 133-148 (1977; Zbl 0407.58024)]. The method is extended to non-Hermitian and even non-normal Dirac like operators. The equivalence between the zeta-function approach and that of Fujiwara is established for Hermitian operators, several two dimensional fermionic models are treated by this method.