Generating functional for mesonic ChPT with virtual photons in a general covariant gauge
The divergent part of the one-loop effective action in Chiral Perturbation Theory with virtual photons has been evaluated in an arbitrary covariant gauge. The differential operator that emerges in the functional determinant is of non-minimal type, for which the standard heat kernel methods are not directly applicable. Both the SU(2) and SU(3) cases have been worked out. A comparison with existing results in the literature is given.