In an analogy to the odd-dimensional case we define the parity anomaly as the part of the one-loop effective action for fermions associated with spectral asymmetry of the Dirac operator. This quantity is computed directly on four-dimensional manifolds with boundary and related to the Chern-Simons current on the boundary. Despite a quite unusual Chern-Simons level obtained, the action is gauge invariant and passes all consistency checks.

In this paper we consider gravitational parity anomaly in three and four dimensions. We start with a re-computation of this anomaly on a 3D manifold without boundaries and with a critical comparison of our results to the previous calculations. Then we compute the anomaly on 4D manifolds with boundaries with local bag boundary conditions. We find, that gravitational parity anomaly is localized on the boundary and contains a gravitational Chern-Simons terms together with a term depending of the extrinsic curvature. We also discuss the main properties of the anomaly, as the conformal invariance, relations between 3D and 4D anomalies, etc.

We discuss the propagation of bosons (scalars, gauge fields and gravitons) at high energy in the context of the spectral action. Using heat kernel techniques, we find that in the high-momentum limit the quadratic part of the action does not contain positive powers of the derivatives. We interpret this as the fact that the two point Green functions vanish for nearby points, where the proximity scale is given by the inverse of the cutoff