Degrees of freedom and the quantization of anomalous gauge theories

Abstract

We show, for the two-dimensional case, that the anomalous gauge theory of chiral fermions yields degrees of freedom whose number depends on the regularization procedure. For a particular regularization, the gauge fields have dim[∇G]-rank[∇G] surviving degrees of freedom, while for others this number changes to 2 dim[∇G]. Our procedure and results are compared with Faddeev's recent suggestions on how to quantize anomalous gauge theories. We conclude with some remarks on the four-dimensional case.