The next seminar of the Higher Spin Gravity online-club series, co-organised by UMONS and the University of Tours, will be given by Kara Farnsworth (Case Western Reserve University).

Scale vs. Conformal Invariance for Linearized Gravity

In this talk I will discuss the problem of scale vs. conformal invariance in the context of linearized gravity. Theories at renormalization group fixed points are, by definition, scale invariant, however they are often found to be invariant under the full conformal group. This extended conformal symmetry is useful in constraining the theory, but it is not completely clear in what context a scale invariant theory can be assumed to be also conformally invariant. I will present an overview of this problem, progress that has been made in the context of quantum field theory, and our recent work in which we show that linearized gravity (a scale invariant theory) is actually conformally invariant. I will also discuss the possibility of extending this to higher-spin theories.