2004/12/31 by Guilherme de Berredo-Peixoto, Ilya L. Shapiro · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.71.064005
published as Phys.Rev.D71:064005,2005 · LaTeX file, 30 pages, 5 figures. Several misprints in the intermediate expressions corrected
arxiv created 2006/04/24 · arxiv updated 2011/08/17
Higher derivative theory is one of the important models of quantum gravity, renormalizable and asymptotically free within the standard perturbative approach. We consider the 4-ε renormalization group for this theory, an approach which proved fruitful in 2-ε models. A consistent formulation in dimension n=4-ε requires taking quantum effects of the topological term into account, hence we perform calculation which is more general than the ones done before. In the special n=4 case we confirm a known result by Fradkin-Tseytlin and Avramidi-Barvinsky, while contributions from topological term do cancel. In the more general case of 4-ε renormalization group equations there is an extensive ambiguity related to gauge-fixing dependence. As a result, physical interpretation of these equations is not universal unlike we treat ε as a small parameter. In the sector of essential couplings one can find a number of new fixed points, some of them have no analogs in the n=4 case.