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Gauge Independent Trace Anomaly for Gravitons

High Energy Physics - Theory 2010-11-01 v2

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/9503187,
  title  = {Gauge Independent Trace Anomaly for Gravitons},
  author = {H. T. Cho and R. Kantowski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/9503187},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

19 pages, additional references and title change