| In 1970 Callan, Coleman, and Jackiw found that it is always possible to improve the symmetric stress-energy tensor of a renormalizable relativistic field theory over (3+1)-dimensional flat space-time manifold. The improved stress-energy tensor defines the same field energy-momentum and angular momentum as the conventional tensor, and it is traceless for a non-interacting field theory when all coupling constants are physically dimensionless. The question for existence of an improved stress-energy tensor for a scale invariant relativistic field theory on a (1+1)-dimensional flat space-time manifold has been a long standing open problem for almost 30 years. In this thesis, I develop the weakest set of necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of a conserved symmetric traceless stress-energy tensor for a scale invariant relativistic field theory over a d-dimensional flat space-time manifold. This improved tensor, which defines the same conserved charges as the canonical tensor, has been explicitly constructed for arbitrary space-time dimensions including d = 2 intrinsically from the flat space-time field theory without coupling it with gravity. As an example, I derive the improved tensor of (1+1)-dimensional Liouville field theory. We discuss two remarkable results: (1) full conformal symmetry over the flat space-time is sufficient but not necessary for the existence of the improved tensor; (2) quite surprisingly, the improved stress-energy tensor exists in all space-time dimensions for a free massless Abelian U(1) gauge theory provided the gauge symmetry has been broken in favor of Lorentz gauge for d ≠ 2, 4. |
