Stress tensor correlators in the Schwinger–Keldysh formalism

Abstract

We express stress tensor correlators using the Schwinger–Keldysh formalism. The absence of off-diagonal counterterms in this formalism ensures that the +− and −+ correlators are free of primitive divergences. We use dimensional regularization in position space to explicitly check this at one loop order for a massless scalar on a flat space background. We use the same procedure to show that the ++ correlator contains the divergences first computed by 't Hooft and Veltman for the scalar contribution to the graviton self-energy.