Testing chiral anomalies with hadronic currents

Chiral anomalies are calculated using an effective-Lagrangian technique introduced for anomalies by Wess and Zumino and recently reformulated by Witten. Anomalous amplitudes for vector currents decaying into three pseudoscalars are tested by comparison with $K_{l4\mathrm{}}$ decay, $\eta$ and ${\eta }^{\prime }\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}\gamma$, and strong decays of vector mesons. The agreement with experiment for $K_{l4\mathrm{}}$ is an impressive verification of the anomaly in the vector current. For $\eta$ and ${\eta }^{\prime }$ decay, the results are excellent, and for the strong decays, good. Since the electromagnetic and strong amplitudes have been extrapolated to higher momenta with a final-state-interaction approximation, it is not surprising that the agreement is less good here, where, indeed, further dynamical assumptions are needed. A number of new predictions are made for hadronic decays of ${\rho }^{\prime }$, ${\omega }^{\prime }$, and ${\phi }^{\prime }$.