  We investigate the renormalization properties of minimally doubled fermions,
at one loop in perturbation theory. Our study is based on the two particular
realizations of Borici-Creutz and Karsten-Wilczek. A common feature of both
formulations is the breaking of hyper-cubic symmetry, which requires that the
lattice actions are supplemented by suitable counterterms. We show that three
counterterms are required in each case and determine their coefficients to one
loop in perturbation theory. For both actions we compute the vacuum
polarization of the gluon. It is shown that no power divergences appear and
that all contributions which arise from the breaking of Lorentz symmetry are
cancelled by the counterterms. We also derive the conserved vector and
axial-vector currents for Karsten-Wilczek fermions. Like in the case of the
previously studied Borici-Creutz action, one obtains simple expressions,
involving only nearest-neighbour sites. We suggest methods how to fix the
coefficients of the counterterms non-perturbatively and discuss the
implications of our findings for practical simulations.
