Conformal symmetry, anomaly and effective action for metric-scalar gravity with torsion

TL;DR

This paper explores conformal symmetry in a metric-scalar-torsion gravity system, showing torsion can act as a compensating field to achieve classical equivalence with General Relativity and analyzing quantum anomalies and effective actions.

Contribution

It demonstrates how torsion can restore conformal invariance in metric-scalar gravity and computes quantum anomalies and effective actions at one-loop level.

Findings

Torsion acts as a compensating field for conformal symmetry.

Classical equivalence to General Relativity is achieved with specific actions.

One-loop divergences and anomalies are explicitly calculated.

Abstract

We consider some aspects of conformal symmetry in a metric-scalar-torsion system. It is shown that, for some special choice of the action, torsion acts as a compensating field and the full theory is conformally equivalent to General Relativity on classical level. Due to the introduction of torsion, this equivalence can be provided for the positively-defined gravitational and scalar actions. One-loop divergences arising from the scalar loop are calculated and both the consequent anomaly and the anomaly-induced effective action are derived.