This book presents a comprehensive review of the subject of gravitational effects in quantum field theory. Although the treatment is general, special emphasis is given to the Hawking black hole evaporation effect, and to particle creation processes in the early universe. The last decade has witnessed a phenomenal growth in this subject. This is the first attempt to collect and unify the vast literature that has contributed to this development. All the major technical results are presented, and the theory is developed carefully from first principles. Here is everything that students or researchers will need to embark upon calculations involving quantum effects of gravity at the so-called one-loop approximation level.

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We show that creation of field quanta can occur even in conformally trivial situations, contrary to popular belief. This conformal-symmetry breaking owes its existence to the so-called conformal anomaly in the field stress tensor which, in the case of interact~ng fields in curved spacetime, contains state-dependent, nongeometrical, and other terms which are associated with particle generation. The effect is explicitly demonstrated for massless theory in a Robertson-Walker spacetime.

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