Massless Scalar Degrees of Freedom in QCD and in the Electroweak Sector from the Trace Anomaly

Abstract

The interaction of QCD and electroweak sector with gravity is characterized by the generation of a massless pole in a specific form factor present in the 1-loop effective action. We briefly illustrate how to single out this behaviour in perturbation theory, by taking as an example the $TJJ$ vertex, with $T$ denoting the energy momentum tensor of the Standard Model. The breaking of scale invariance, due to the trace anomaly, is then related to the appearance of a local degree of freedom in the effective action, which is of dilaton type.