Trace and diffeomorphism anomalies of the classical Liouville theory, Virasoro algebras, Weyl-gauging and all that

Abstract

To fully clarify the invariance of the classical Liouville field theory under the Virasoro algebra, we first elucidate in detail the concept of classical anomaly, discuss the occurrence of two symmetry algebras associated to this theory, and provide some new formulae to compute the classical center in a general fashion. We apply this to the study of the symmetries of the free boson in two dimensions. Moving to Liouville, we see how this gives rise to an energy-momentum tensor with non-tensorial conformal transformations, in flat space, and a non-vanishing trace, in curved space. We provide a variety of improvements of the (local) theory, that restore Weyl invariance. With explicit computations, we show that the covariant conservation of the Weyl-invariance-improved energy-momentum tensor is lost, in general, and relate the chosen improvement with the corresponding subset of preserved diffeomorphisms. The non-tensorial transformation rule of the Weyl-invariance-improved energy-momentum tensor in curved space is explicitly back-traced to the Virasoro center.