Anomalies, equivalence and renormalization of cosmological frames

Abstract

We study the question of whether two frames of a given physical theory are equivalent or not in the presence of quantum corrections. By using field theory arguments we claim that equivalence is broken in the presence of anomalous symmetries in one of the frames. This is particularized to the case of the relation between the Einstein and Jordan frames in scalar-tensor theories used to describe early Universe dynamics. Although in this case a regularization that cancels the anomaly exists, the renormalized theory always develop a non-vanishing contribution to the S-matrix that is present only in the Jordan frame, promoting the different frames to different physical theories that must be UV completed in a different way.