A note on the parity anomaly from the Hamiltonian point of view

Abstract

We review the parity anomaly of the massless Dirac fermion in $2+1$ dimensions from the Hamiltonian, as opposed to the path integral, point of view. We have two main goals for this note. First, we hope to make the parity anomaly more accessible to condensed matter physicists, who generally prefer to work within the Hamiltonian formalism. The parity anomaly plays an important role in modern condensed matter physics, as the massless Dirac fermion is the surface theory of the time-reversal invariant topological insulator (TI) in $3+1$ dimensions. Our second goal is to clarify the relation between the time-reversal symmetry of the massless Dirac fermion and the fractional charge of $\pm\frac{1}{2}$ (in units of $e$) which appears on the surface of the TI when a magnetic monopole is present in the bulk. To accomplish these goals we study the Dirac fermion in the Hamiltonian formalism using two different regularization schemes. One scheme is consistent with the time-reversal symmetry of the massless Dirac fermion, but leads to the aforementioned fractional charge. The second scheme does not lead to any fractionalization, but it does break time-reversal symmetry. For both regularization schemes we also compute the effective action $S_{\text{eff}}[A]$ which encodes the response of the Dirac fermion to a background electromagnetic field $A$. We find that the two effective actions differ by a Chern-Simons counterterm with fractional level equal to $\frac{1}{2}$, as is expected from path integral treatments of the parity anomaly. Finally, we propose the study of a bosonic analogue of the parity anomaly as a topic for future work.