Calculation of the color axial anomaly on the basis of the gauge-invariant spatial point-splitting regularization

The nonsinglet axial anomaly is calculated by employing Schwinger’s point-splitting regularization of the interaction between fermions and a non-Abelian gauge field. This method makes it possible to obtain a covariant expression for the anomaly directly from the effective action for the gauge field. Previously, the anomaly under study was calculated by many other methods. However, all calculations based on the point-splitting regularization (from the pioneering study of Bardeen in 1969) involve a number of intermediate steps and subtractions of specially chosen polynomials in the field.