Boundary terms of conformal anomaly

Abstract

We analyze the structure of the boundary terms in the conformal anomaly integrated over a manifold with boundaries. We suggest that the anomalies of type B, polynomial in the Weyl tensor, are accompanied with the respective boundary terms of the Gibbons-Hawking type. Their form is dictated by the requirement that they produce a variation which compensates the normal derivatives of the metric variation on the boundary in order to have a well-defined variational procedure. This suggestion agrees with recent findings in four dimensions for free fields of various spin. We generalize this consideration to six dimensions and derive explicitly the respective boundary terms. We point out that the integrated conformal anomaly in odd dimensions is non-vanishing due to the boundary terms. These terms are specified in three and five dimensions.

9 pages; v2: new section on conformal anomaly in odd dimensions, more references added; v3: new term in (20) and new reference, version to appear in PLB

References in corpus (2)

• Universal Entanglement and Boundary Geometry in Conformal Field Theory
• Conformal anomalies of CFT's with boundaries

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