Curved domain-wall fermion and its anomaly inflow

Abstract

We investigate the effect of $U(1)$ gauge field on lattice fermion systems with a curved domain-wall mass term. In the same way as the conventional flat domain-wall fermion, the chiral edge modes appear localized at the wall, whose Dirac operator contains the induced gravitational potential as well as the $U(1)$ vector potential. In the case of $S^1$ domain-wall fermion on a two-dimensional flat lattice, we find a competition between the Aharonov-Bohm(AB) effect and gravitational gap in the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum, which leads to anomaly of the time-reversal ($T$) symmetry. Our numerical result shows a good consistency with the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer index theorem on a disk inside the $S^1$ domain-wall, which describes the cancellation of the $T$ anomaly between the bulk and edge. When the $U(1)$ flux is squeezed inside one plaquette, and the AB phase takes a quantized value $\pi$ mod $2\pi \mathbb{Z}$, the anomaly inflow drastically changes: the strong flux creates another domain-wall around the flux to make the two zero modes coexist. This phenomenon is also observed in the $S^2$ domain-wall fermion in the presence of a magnetic monopole. We find that the domain-wall creation around the monopole microscopically explains the Witten effect.

Comments: 30 pages, 13 figures, minor corrections