Adiabatic Regularization for Gauge Field and the Conformal Anomaly

Abstract

We construct the adiabatic regularization method for a $U(1)$ gauge field in a conformally flat spacetime by quantizing in the canonical formalism the gauge fixed $U(1)$ theory with mass terms for the gauge fields and the ghost fields. We show that the adiabatic expansion for the mode functions and the adiabatic vacuum can be defined in a similar way using WKB-type solutions as the scalar fields. As an application of the adiabatic method, we compute the trace of the energy momentum tensor and reproduces the known result for the conformal anomaly obtained by the other regularization methods. The availability of the adiabatic expansion scheme for gauge field allows one to study the renormalization of the de-Sitter space maximal superconformal Yang-Mills theory using the adiabatic regularization method.