%0 Journal Article
%T Electromagnetic Duality Anomaly in Curved Spacetimes
%A Agullo, I.
%A del Rio, A.
%A Navarro-Salas, J.
%J Physical Review Letters
%D 2017
%V 118
%N 11
%I Amer Physical Soc
%@ 0031-9007
%G English
%F Agullo_etal2017
%O WOS:000396267100003
%O exported from refbase (https://references.ific.uv.es/refbase/show.php?record=2964), last updated on Thu, 23 Mar 2017 11:08:43 +0000
%X The source-free Maxwell action is invariant under electric-magnetic duality rotations in arbitrary spacetimes. This leads to a conserved classical Noether charge. We show that this conservation law is broken at the quantum level in the presence of a background classical gravitational field with a nontrivial Chern-Pontryagin invariant, in parallel with the chiral anomaly for massless Dirac fermions. Among the physical consequences, the net polarization of the quantum electromagnetic field is not conserved.
%R 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.111301
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08879
%U https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.111301
%P 111301-5pp