Chiral symmetry restoration and axial vector renormalization for Wilson fermions - art. no. 014504

Lattice gauge theories with Wilson fermions break chiral symmetry. In the U (1) axial vector current this manifests itself in an anomaly. On the other hand it is generally expected that the axial vector flavor mixing current i s nonanomalous. We give a short, but strict proof of this to all orders of perturbation theory, and show that chiral symmetry restoration implies a un ique multiplicative renormalization constant for the current. This constant is determined entirely from an irrelevant operator in the Ward identity. T he basic ingredients going into the proof are the lattice Ward identity, ch arge conjugation symmetry and the power counting theorem. We compute the re normalization constant to one loop order. It is largely independent of the particular lattice realization of the current.