Eur. Phys. J. C (2015) 75: 338
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3561-z

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

One-loop conformal anomaly in an implicit momentum space regularization framework

¹ Departamento de Física, ICEX, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, P.O. Box 702, Belo Horizonte, MG, 30.161-970, Brazil
² Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Lavras, P.O. Box 3037, Lavras, MG, 37.200-000, Brazil
³ Centre for Particle Theory, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Durham University, Science Laboratories South Rd., Durham, DH1 3LE, UK

^* e-mail: arvieira@fisica.ufmg.br

Received: 20 May 2015
Accepted: 8 July 2015
Published online: 18 July 2015

Abstract

In this paper we consider matter fields in a gravitational background in order to compute the breaking of the conformal current at one-loop order. Standard perturbative calculations of conformal symmetry breaking expressed by the non-zero trace of the energy-momentum tensor have shown that some violating terms are regularization dependent, which may suggest the existence of spurious breaking terms in the anomaly. Therefore, we perform the calculation in a momentum space regularization framework in which regularization dependent terms are judiciously parametrized. We compare our results with those obtained in the literature and conclude that there is an unavoidable arbitrariness in the anomalous term .