Effective Dilaton Potential in Linearized Gravity

Abstract

Considering the linearized gravity with matter fields, the effective potential of the ``conformal dilaton'' in the string frame is generated semiclassically by one-loop contribution of heavy matter fields. This in turn generates a nontrivial potential for the physical dilaton in the Einstein frame with the trace of the graviton in the Einstein frame gauged away. The remaining manifest local spacetime symmetry is only the volume preserving diffeomorphism symmetry. The consistency of this procedure is examined and the possibility of spontaneous diffeomorphism symmetry breaking is suggested.