Thursday, January 18, 2018

string theory - Why does Weyl invariance imply a traceless energy-momentum tensor?


I've begun to self-study String Theory from Polchinski and Becker, Becker and Schwarz. I don't see why the fact that the Polyakov action is invariant under Weyl transformations is related to the tracelessness of the energy-momentum tensor. I can follow the argument in BBS with gauge freedom just fine, but then they mention that this is related to Weyl invariance. On the other hand, Polchinski simply says



The invariance of SP under arbitrary Weyl transformations further implies that γabδδγabSP=0Taa=0



(Here γab is the worldsheet metric.)


How does this follow from Weyl invariance?



Answer



The (Belinfante-Rosenfeld) stress energy momentum tensor is defined as


Tμν1gδSδgμν



where the worldsheet metric is gμν. By definition of the functional derivative, for any variation δgμν we have


δS=δSδgμνδgμν.


Consider now the case where δgμν is an infinitesimal Weyl invariance, or


δgμν=Ω2gμν, where Ω is any function.


Weyl invariance of S means that δS has to vanish for all δgμν of this form, or


0=δSδgμνΩ2gμν.


Then the fundamental lemma of the calculus of variations implies tracelessness of the functional derivative δSδgμν which is equal to the stress energy tensor up to various proportionality factors.


Incidentally, this line of reasoning also gives you things like Bianchi identities (try this for the Einstein action).


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