On the trace anomaly of a Weyl fermion in a gauge background

In this thesis we study the trace anomaly of a Weyl fermion in an abelian gauge background. We first introduce the topic of anomaly in Quantum Fields Theory and provide case studies of a global and a gauge anomaly. Then, we review the lagrangians of the Weyl fermion and Dirac fermion, the models that are the focus of our chiral and trace anomaly computations. Since we evaluate the anomalies using Pauli-Villars (PV) regularization, we present different PV masses and discuss the classical symmetries they break. We identify the differential operators that enter our regularization schemes and we review the method that we use to evaluate anomalies: we read them from the path integral à la Fujikawa and compute them with heat kernel formulas. Then, we evaluate the chiral and trace anomaly of the models we are interested in. The chiral anomaly is well studied in the literature and we reproduce the standard result. The trace anomaly is our original result and, although the presence of the chiral anomaly implies a breakdown of gauge invariance, we find that the trace anomaly can be cast in a gauge invariant form. The issue is analogous to the one recently discussed in the literature about a conjectured contribution of an odd-parity term to the trace anomaly of a Weyl fermion in curved backgrounds. With an abelian gauge background, this odd-parity term would be a Chern-Pontryagin density, that does not appear in our final results.