The anomalous dimensions of the Planck mass and the cosmological constant are calculated in a renormalizable quantum conformal gravity with a single dimensionless coupling, which is formulated using dimensional regularization on the basis of Hathrell's works for conformal anomalies. The dynamics of the traceless tensor field is handled by the Weyl action, while that of the conformal-factor field is described by the induced Wess-Zumino actions, including the Riegert action as the kinetic term. Loop calculations are carried out in Landau gauge in order to reduce the number of Feynman diagrams as well as to avoid some uncertainty. Especially, we calculate two-loop quantum gravity corrections to the cosmological constant. It suggests that there is a dynamical solution to the cosmological constant problem.

We study the effective potential in renormalizable quantum gravity with a single dimensionless conformal coupling without a Landau pole. In order to describe a background-free dynamics at the Planck scale and beyond, the conformal-factor field is quantized exactly in a nonperturbative manner. Since this field does not receive renormalization, the field-independent constant in the effective potential becomes itself invariant under the renormalization group flow. That is to say, it gives the physical cosmological constant. We explicitly calculate the physical cosmological constant at the one-loop level in the Landau gauge. We find that it is given by a function of renormalized quantities of the cosmological constant, the Planck mass and the coupling constant, and it should be the observed value. It will give a new perspective on the cosmological constant problem free from an ultraviolet cutoff.

The path integral formulation can reproduce the right energy spectrum of the harmonic oscillator potential, but it cannot resolve the Coulomb potential problem. This is because the path integral cannot properly take into account the boundary condition, which is due to the presence of the scattering states in the Coulomb potential system. On the other hand, the Sommerfeld quantization can reproduce the right energy spectrum of both harmonic oscillator and Coulomb potential cases since the boundary condition is effectively taken into account in this semiclassical treatment. The basic difference between the two schemes should be that no constraint is imposed on the wave function in the path integral while the Sommerfeld quantization rule is derived by requiring that the state vector should be a single-valued function. The limitation of the semiclassical method is also clarified in terms of the square well and δ(x) function potential models.