On the uniqueness of the expected stress-energy tensor in renormalizable field theories

Abstract

It is argued that the ambiguity introduced by the renormalization in the effective action of a four-dimensional renormalizable quantum field theory is at most a local polynomial action of canonical dimension four. The allowed ambiguity in the expected stress-energy tensor of a massive scalar field is severely restricted by this fact.

RevTex, 4 pages, no figures. Minor additions and title changed. To appear in Physical Review D

References in corpus (3)

• Local $\zeta$-function techniques vs point-splitting procedure: a few rigorous results
• How unique is the expected stress-energy tensor of a massive scalar field?
• One-loop stress-tensor renormalization in curved background: the relation between $\zeta$-function and point-splitting approaches, and an improved point-splitting procedure

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Hadamard renormalization of the stress-energy tensor for a quantized scalar field in a general spacetime of arbitrary dimension