Vacuum energy and trace anomaly

Abstract

Concerning the trace anomaly in field theory a nonvanishing vacuum energy breaks the scale symmetry as well, in addition to the usual beta function dependent term, requiring a unit operator in the trace anomaly. This additional term is also necessary in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to cancel the inherent ambiguity in the gluon condensate. The inseparability of the gluon condensate effect from the perturbative contribution to the vacuum energy renders it impossible to isolate the gluon condensate effect on the cosmological constant.