Regularisation, many recipes, but a unique principle: Ward identities and normalisation conditions. The case of CPT violation in QED

We analyse the recent controversy on a possible Chern-Simons like term generated through radiative corrections in QED with a CPT violating term: we prove that, if the theory is correctly defined through Ward identities and normalisation conditions, no Chern-Simons term appears, without any ambiguity. This is related to the fact that such a term is a kind of minor modification of the gauge fixing term, and then no renormalised. The past year literature on that subject is discussed, and we insist on the fact that any absence of an a priori divergence should be explained by some symmetry or some non-renormalisation theorem. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.