Anomaly of a gauge theory under rescaling of the fields

Abstract

We determine the anomaly associated to an arbitrary scaling of the fields in a quantum gauge theory without making use of the Fujikawa method. We show that this anomaly is dependent on the spin term present in the action and at one loop can be directly extracted from the spin contribution to the one loop effective action. Our results can be readily applied to any gauge theory, supersymmetric or not and agree with previous determination for supersymmetric gauge theories based on the Fujikawa method.