A New Look at the Axial Anomaly in Lattice QED with Wilson Fermions

By carrying out a systematic expansion of Feynman integrals in the lattice spacing, we show that the axial anomaly in the U(1) lattice gauge theory with Wilson fermions, as determined in one-loop order from an irrelevant lattice operator in the Ward identity, must necessarily be identical to that computed from the dimensionally regulated continuum Feynman integrals for the triangle diagrams.