The Rapid Communications section is intended for the accelerated publication of important new results. Since manuscripts submitted to this section are given priority treatment both in the editorial ofice and in production, authors should explain in their submittal letter why the work justifies this special handling. A Rapid Communication in Physical Review D should be no longer than five printed pages and must be accompanied by an abstract.A new method for calculating the covariant derivative expansions is presented, particularly in Abelian gauge theories, which can be used to find derivative expansions around nonvanishing gauge field-strength tensors. We apply this method to find the ad',,)*) terms of electron determinants in quantum electrodynamics.
We investigate the short-distance behaviors of the higher-derivative operators appearing in some field theories which attracted much interest recently, for instance, higher-derivative quantum gravity. This study is important to find the short-distance structures of the related propagators and the one-loop divergences. We develop an algorithm which can be used to find asymptotic expansions of the heat kernels for higher-derivative operators. Our method is applicable both to flat-and to curved-space-time cases.
We consider the fourth-order conformal gravity theory. The quantization of the theory is presented in detail. We also calculate, using the heat kernel method, the one-loop divergence and conformal anomaly.
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