Local conformal symmetry and its violation at quantum level

by Ilya Shapiro (Univ. Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brasil)

Friday 14 Nov 2014, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

Room 234 (Geneva University)

The semiclassical approach to quantum gravity is the most developed sector on the intersection of our quantum and gravitational knowledge. One can say that the main achievements in this area are strongly related to conformal (trace) anomaly. In this talk I will review the origin of anomaly and the derivation of the effective action of gravity by integrating anomaly. The most important recent applications are classification of the vacuum states of quantum fields in the vicinity of a black hole and the full QFT-based version of the Starobinsky model of inflation.