A lattice regularization of Weyl fermions in a gravitational background

Abstract

We report on a lattice fermion formulation with a curved domain-wall mass term to nonperturbatively describe fermions in a gravitational background. In our previous work in 2022, we showed under the time-reversal symmetry that the edge-localized massless Dirac fermion appears on one and two-dimensional spherical domain-walls and the spin connection is induced on the lattice in a consistent way with continuum theory. In this work, we extend our study to the Shamir type curved domain-wall fermions without the time-reversal symmetry. We find in the free fermion case that a single Weyl fermion appears on the edge, and feels gravity through the induced spin connection. With a topologically nontrivial $U(1)$ gauge potential, however, we find an oppositely chiral zero mode at the center where the gauge field is singular.

Comments: 9 pages, 6 figures. Talk presented at the 40th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2023), 31 July - 4 August 2023, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, minor corrections