Broken Scale Invariance in Scalar Field Theory

Abstract

We use scalar-field perturbation theory as a laboratory to study broken scale invariance. We pay particular attention to scaling laws (Ward identities for the scale current) and find that they have unusual anomalies whose presence might have been guessed from renormalization-group arguments. The scaling laws also appear to provide a relatively simple way of computing the renormalized amplitudes of the theory, which sidesteps the overlapping-divergence problem.