Anomaly-Induced Phenomena with Massive Fermions: Higher-Landau-Level Dominance from Spatially Modulated Electric Fields

Abstract

We investigate the axial Ward identity for massive fermions under a constant magnetic field at arbitrary strength, maintaining an arbitrary spacetime configuration of a perturbative electric field. We show that a spatially modulated electric field prevents the exact cancellation between the anomaly and pseudoscalar terms, generating a local axial-charge source even in the adiabatic regime where the frequency is subthreshold to massive-fermion production. Remarkably, unlike conventional magnetic responses, this charge generation is dominated not by the contribution of the lowest Landau level, but by those of the higher Landau levels. Our findings provide a microscopic foundation for anomaly-induced transport and anomalous optical responses in gapped systems. In particular, we find that the spatially modulated chiral magnetic effect in weakly gapped Weyl semimetals that exhibits a linear suppression of the magneto-resistance by the magnetic-field strength instead of the renowned quadratic suppression.