Manifestly gauge covariant treatment of lattice chiral fermions

We propose a lattice formulation of the chiral fermion which maximally respects the gauge symmetry and simultaneously is free of the unwanted species doublers. The formulation is based on the lattice fermion propagator and composite operators, rather than on the lattice fermion action. The fermionic determinant is defined as a functional integral of an expectation value of the gauge current operator with respect to the background gauge field: The gauge anomaly is characterized as the nonintegrability. We perform some perturbative tests to confirm the gauge covariance and an absence of the doublers. The formulation can be applied rather straightforwardly to numerical simulations in the quenched approximation. copyright 1997 The American Physical Society