More chiral operators on the lattice

Instead of the Ginsparg-Wilson (GW) relation we only require generalized chiral symmetry and show that this results in a larger class of Dirac operators describing massless fermions, which in addition to GW fermions and to the ones proposed by Fujikawa includes many more general ones. The index turns out to depend solely on a basic unitary operator. We use spectral representations to analyze the new class and to obtain detailed properties. We also show that our weaker conditions still lead properly to Weyl fermions and to chiral gauge theories.