A rederivation of the conformal anomaly for spin-1/2

Abstract

We rederive the conformal anomaly for spin-1/2 fermions by a genuine Feynman graph calculation, which has not been available so far. Although our calculation merely confirms a result that has been known for a long time, the derivation is new, and thus furnishes a method to investigate more complicated cases (in particular concerning the significance of the quantum trace of the stress tensor in non-conformal theories) where there remain several outstanding and unresolved issues.

23 pages + appendices

References in corpus (3)

• Spontaneous Breaking of Conformal Invariance and Trace Anomaly Matching
• Algebraic Classification of Weyl Anomalies in Arbitrary Dimensions
• Trace anomalies in chiral theories revisited

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Axial gravity: a non-perturbative approach to split anomalies
• Conformal Anomaly for Non-Conformal Scalar Fields
• Trace anomaly for Weyl fermions using the Breitenlohner-Maison scheme for ${\gamma }_{\ast }$
• Investigation of Pontryagin trace anomaly using Pauli-Villars regularization
• Chiral fermions, dimensional regularization, and the trace anomaly
• Path integral calculation of heat kernel traces with first order operator insertions