Electromagnetic Duality Anomaly in Curved Spacetimes
Ivan Agullo1, Adrian Del Rio1,2, Jose Navarro-Salas2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803-4001, USA.
Abstract:
The source-free Maxwell action is invariant under electric-magnetic duality rotations in arbitrary spacetimes. This leads to a conserved classical Noether charge. We show that this conservation law is broken at the quantum level in the presence of a background classical gravitational field with a nontrivial Chern-Pontryagin invariant, in parallel with the chiral anomaly for massless Dirac fermions. Among the physical consequences, the net polarization of the quantum electromagnetic field is not conserved.
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