Abstract
This is a report on work in progress about gravitational trace anomalies. We review the problem of trace anomalies in chiral theories in view of the possibility that such anomalies may contain not yet considered CP violating terms. The research consists of various stages. In the first stage we examine chiral theories at one-loop with external gravity and show that a (CP violating) Pontryagin term appears in the trace anomaly in the presence of an unbalance of left and right chirality. However the imaginary coupling of such term implies a breakdown of unitarity, putting a severe constraint on such type of models. In a second stage we consider the compatibility of the presence of the Pontryagin density in the trace anomaly with (local) supersymmetry, coming to an essentially negative conclusion.
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Acknowledgements
This contribution will appear also in the Proc. of the 16th Workshop “What comes beyond the standard models”, Bled, 14–21 of July, 2013, eds. N.S. Mankoč Borštnik, H.B. Nielsen, D. Lukman, DMFA Založništvo, Ljubljana December 2013, pp. 22–30.
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Bonora, L., Giaccari, S., Lima De Souza, B. (2014). Revisiting Trace Anomalies in Chiral Theories. In: Dobrev, V. (eds) Lie Theory and Its Applications in Physics. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 111. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55285-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55285-7_1
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