A Mathematical Construction of the Axial Anomaly in the BV Formalism

Eugene Rabinovich

Published 2017-11-30Version 1

The axial anomaly of the massless free fermion is given by the index of the corresponding Dirac operator. We use the BV formalism and the methods of equivariant quantization of Costello and Gwilliam to produce a new, mathematical derivation of this result. We formalize through these methods the conventional wisdom that the anomaly measures the failure to construct a well-defined partition function.