Restricted Weyl Symmetry and Spontaneous Symmetry Breakdown of Conformal Symmetry

Abstract

We elucidate the relation between the restricted Weyl symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breakdown of conformal symmetry. Using a scalar-tensor gravity, we show that the restricted Weyl symmetry leads to spontaneous symmetry breakdown of a global scale symmetry when the vacuum expectation value of a scalar field takes a non-zero value. It is then shown that this spontaneous symmetry breakdown induces spontaneous symmetry breakdown of special conformal symmetry in a flat Minkowski space-time, but the resultant Nambu-Goldstone boson is not an independent physical mode but expressed in terms of the derivative of the dilaton which is the Nambu-Goldstone boson of the global scale symmetry. In other words, the theories which are invariant under the general coordinate transformation and the restricted Weyl transformation exhibit a Nambu-Goldstone phase where both special conformal transformation and dilatation are spontaneously broken while preserving the Poincar\'{e} symmetry.