On anomalous commutators associated with anomalies

Abstract

It is shown that conformal as well as chiral anomalies in spinor electrodynamics lead to anomalous commutators in the canonical local-operator approach. This may support the association of anomalies with jacobian factors in the path integral approach, since the appearance of the jacobian suggests that certain classical symmetries are not compatible with the quantization procedure. Some subtle aspects in the renormalization of the conventional energy-momentum tensor are also clarified.