Radiative decay of mesons and anomaly in 2+1 dimensions

In 2+1 space-time, we study the radiative decay of mesons with Yukawa couplings to two and four component fermions. In a four component theory, the electromagnetic current is free of parity odd radiative corrections; however, an axial U(1) current is shown to develop a finite vacuum expectation value. Unlike even dimensions this anomaly is temperature dependent and does not play any role in the radiative decay. We calculate the effective action for the mesons and show that a finite kinetic term for these fields is induced at the one-loop level and vanishes as the temperature goes to infinity. (orig.)