Vanishing of the Second-Order Correction to the Triangle Anomaly in Landau-Gauge, Zero-Fermion-Mass Quantum Electrodynamics

Abstract

We investigate possible second-order radiative corrections to the axial-vector divergence anomaly in spinor electrodynamics. Our procedure is to directly evaluate the shift terms which lead to the anomaly in zero-fermion-mass, Landau-gauge electrodynamics. This version of electrodynamics is chosen because it makes the electron propagator and vertex function finite, so that no infinite renormalizations need be dealt with in the anomaly calculation. We find that the second-order corrections to the anomaly do vanish, in agreement with the work of Adler and Bardeen and with calculations (by different methods) of other authors.