Scale vs. Conformal Invariance at the IR Fixed Point of Quantum Gravity

Abstract

We examine the question of scale vs. conformal invariance for the linearized Einstein-Hilbert action, which describes the IR fixed point of quantum gravity. In $D=4$, although the action is not conformally invariant in the usual sense, we explicitly show that the theory is a conformal field theory at the level of correlation functions. In higher dimensions, we show that the theory is scale but not conformally invariant, but can be embedded into a larger non-unitary conformal field theory, analogous to what has been found for Maxwell theory in $D>4$. We give evidence that similar statements are true for all free higher spin theories.

11 pages. v2 typos fixed, version appearing in PRD

References in corpus (1)

• Introduction to Effective Field Theory

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