LAUSR

We consider the lattice formulation of SO(10) chiral gauge theory with left-handed Weyl fermions in the 16-dimensional spinor representation ($\underline{16}$) within the framework of the overlap fermion/Ginsparg–Wilson relation. We define a manifestly gauge-invariant path-integral measure for the left-handed Weyl field using all the components of the Dirac field, but the right-handed part of it is just saturated completely by inserting a suitable product of the SO(10)-invariant ’t Hooft vertices in terms of the right-handed field. The definition of the measure applies to all possible topological sectors of admissible link fields. The measure possesses all required transformation properties under lattice symmetries and the induced effective action is CP invariant. The global U(1) symmetry of the left-handed field is anomalous due to the non-trivial transformation of the measure, while that of the right-handed field is explicitly broken by the ’t Hooft vertices. There remains the issue of smoothness and locality in the gauge-field dependence of the Weyl fermion measure, but the question is well defined and the necessary and sufficient condition for this property is formulated in terms of the correlation functions of the right-handed auxiliary fields. In the weak gauge-coupling limit at least, all the auxiliary fields have short-range correlations and the question can be addressed further by Monte Carlo methods without encountering the sign problem. We also discuss the relations of our formulation to other approaches/proposals to decouple the species doubling/mirror degrees of freedom. These include the Eichten–Preskill model, the mirror-fermion model with overlap fermions, the domain-wall fermion model with the boundary Eichten–Preskill term, 4D topological insulator/superconductor with a gapped boundary phase, and the recent studies on the PMS phase/“mass without symmetry breaking”. We clarify the similarities and differences in the technical details and show that our proposal is a unified and well defined testing ground for that basic question.