Dilaton: Saving Conformal Symmetry

Abstract

The characteristic feature of the spontaneous symmetry breaking is the presence of the Goldstone mode(s). For the conformal symmetry broken spontaneously the corresponding Goldstone boson is the dilaton. Coupling an arbitrary system to the dilaton in a consistent (with quantum corrections) way has certain difficulties due to the trace anomaly. In this paper we present the approach allowing for an arbitrary system without the gravitational anomaly to keep the dilaton massless at all orders in perturbation theory, i.e. to build a theory with conformal symmetry broken spontaneously.