Spontaneously Broken Conformal Symmetry: Dealing with the Trace Anomaly

Abstract: The majority of renormalizable field theories possessing the scale invariance at the classical level exhibits the trace anomaly once quantum corrections are taken into account. This leads to the breaking of scale and conformal invariance. At the same time any realistic theory must contain gravity and is thus non-renormalizable. We show that discarding the renormalizability it is possible to construct viable models allowing to preserve the scale invariance at the quantum level. We present explicit one-loop computations for two toy models to demonstrate the main idea of the approach. Constructing the renormalized energy momentum tensor we show that it is traceless, meaning that the conformal invariance is also preserved.