Anomalous transport with overlap fermions

Anomalous correlators of vector and axial currents which enter the Kubo formulae for the chiral magnetic and the chiral separation conductivities are explicitly calculated for free overlap fermions on the lattice. The results are confronted with continuum calculations in the finite-temperature regularization, and a subtle point of such regularization for chiral magnetic conductivity related to the correct counting of the chiral states is highlighted. In agreement with some previous claims in the literature, we find that in a lattice regularization which respects gauge invariance, the chiral magnetic conductivity vanishes. We point out that the relation of anomalous transport coefficients to axial anomaly is nontrivial due to the non-commutativity of their infrared limit and the Taylor expansion in baryon or chiral chemical potential. In particular, we argue that the vector and axial Ward identities fix the asymptotic behavior of anomalous current current correlators in the limit of large momenta. Basing on the work of Knecht et al. on the perturbative non-renormalization of the transverse part of the correlator of two vector and one axial currents, we demonstrate that the relation of the anomalous vector vector correlator to axial anomaly holds perturbatively in massless QCD but might be subject to non-perturbative corrections. Finally, we identify kinematical regimes in which the anomalous transport coefficients can be extracted from lattice measurements. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.