Exploring anomalies by many-body correlations

Abstract

The quantum anomaly can be written alternatively into a form violating conservation laws or as non-gauge invariant currents seen explicitly on the example of chiral anomaly. By reinterpreting the many-body averaging, the connection to Pauli-Villars regularization is established which gives the anomalous term a new interpretation as arising from quantum fluctuations by many-body correlations at short distances. This is exemplified by using an effective many-body quantum potential which realizes quantum Slater sums by classical calculations. It is shown that these quantum potentials avoid the quantum anomaly but approaches the same anomalous result by many-body correlations. A measure for the quality of quantum potentials is suggested to describe these quantum fluctuations in the mean energy. Consequently quantum anomalies might be a short-cut way of single-particle field theory to account for many-body effects. This conjecture is also supported since the chiral anomaly can be derived by a completely conserving quantum kinetic theory.