2 v 2 4 D ec 1 99 6 Non Abelian Bosonization in Two and Three Dimensions

We discuss non-Abelian bosonization of two and three dimensional fermions using a path-integral framework in which the bosonic action follows from the evaluation of the fermion determinant for the Dirac operator in the presence of a vector field. This naturally leads to the Wess-Zumino-Witten action for massless two-dimensional fermions and to a Chern-Simons action for very massive three dimensional fermions. One advantage of our approach is that it allows to derive the exact bosonization recipe for fermion currents in a systematic way.