Anomaly of the electromagnetic duality of Maxwell theory

Abstract: Every physicist knows that the classical electromagnetism is described by Maxwell's equations and that it is invariant under the electromagnetic duality S: (E, B) → (B, −E). However, the properties of the electromagnetic duality in the quantum theory might not be as well known to physicists and are in fact not very well understood in the literature. Recently, we uncovered a feature of Maxwell theory in the situation where going around nontrivial paths in the spacetime involves the action of the duality transformation, namely that it has a quantum anomaly. We found that the anomaly of this system in a particular formulation is 56 times that of a Weyl fermion. Our result reproduces, as a special case, the known anomaly of the all-fermion electrodynamics — a version of the Maxwell theory where particles of odd (electric or magnetic) charge are fermions — discovered in the last few years.

HEP - theory

Audience: researchers in the topic

East Asian String Webinars

Series comments: For the link to the online webinar, see the webpage of East Asian String Webinars, eastasianstrings.org