The Explicit Derivation of QED Trace Anomaly in Symmetry-Preserving Loop Regularization at One Loop Level

Abstract

The QED trace anomaly is calculated at one-loop level based on the loop regularization method which is realized in 4-dimensional spacetime and preserves gauge symmetry and Poincare symmetry in spite of the introduction of two mass scales, namely the ultraviolet (UV) cut-off $M_c$ and infrared (IR) cut-off $μ_s$. It is shown that the dilation Ward identity which relates the three-point diagrams with the vacuum polarization diagrams gets the standard form of trace anomaly through quantum corrections in taking the consistent limit $M_c\to \infty$ and $μ_s = 0$ which recovers the original integrals. This explicitly demonstrates that the loop regularization method is indeed a self-consistent regularization scheme which is applicable to the calculations not only for the chiral anomaly but also for the trace anomaly, at least at one-loop level. It is also seen that the consistency conditions which relates the tensor-type and scalar-type irreducible loop integrals (ILIs) are crucial for obtaining a consistent result. As a comparison, we also present the one-loop calculations by using the usual Pauli-Villars regularization and the dimensional regularization.