Gauge Independent Trace Anomaly for Gravitons

Abstract

We show that the trace anomaly for gravitons calculated using the usual effective action formalism depends on the choice of gauge when the background spacetime is not a solution of the classical equation of motion, that is, when off-shell. We then use the gauge independent Vilkovisky-DeWitt effective action to restore gauge independence to the off-shell case. Additionally we explicitly evaluate trace anomalies for some N-sphere background spacetimes.

19 pages, additional references and title change

References in corpus (3)

• One-loop Vilkovisky-DeWitt Counterterms for 2D Gravity plus Scalar Field Theory
• Zeta-Functions for Non-Minimal Operators
• Convenient Versus Unique Effective Action Formalism in 2D Dilaton-Maxwell Quantum Gravity

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Zeta-Functions for Non-Minimal Operators
• Vilkovisky-DeWitt Effective Action for Einstein Gravity on Kaluza-Klein Spacetimes $M^4\times S^N$
• The renormalization group and spontaneous compactification of a higher-dimensional scalar field theory in curved spacetime