Motivated by the search for possible CP violating terms in the trace of the energy-momentum tensor in theories coupled to gravity we revisit the problem of trace anomalies in chiral theories. We recalculate the latter and ascertain that in the trace of the energy-momentum tensor of theories with chiral fermions at one-loop the Pontryagin density appears with an imaginary coefficient. We argue that this may break unitarity, in which case the trace anomaly has to be used as a selective criterion for theories, analogous to the chiral anomalies in gauge theories. We analyze some remarkable consequences of this fact, that seem to have been overlooked in the literature.

In a previous paper a method was proposed to find exact analytic solutions of open string field theory describing lower dimensional lumps, by incorporating in string field theory an exact renormalization group flow generated by a relevant operator in a worldsheet CFT. In this paper we compute the energy of one such solution, which is expected to represent a D24 brane. We show, both numerically and analytically, that its value corresponds to the theoretically expected one.Comment: 45 pages, former section 2 suppressed, Appendix D added, comments and references added, typos corrected. Erratum adde

This article deals with two main topics. One is odd parity trace anomalies in Weyl fermion theories in a 4d curved background,

We explicitly compute the tree-level on-shell four-graviton amplitudes in four, five and six dimensions for local and weakly nonlocal gravitational theories that are quadratic in both, the Ricci and scalar curvature with form factors of the d'Alembertian operator inserted between. More specifically we are interested in renormalizable, superrenormalizable or finite theories. The scattering amplitudes for these theories turn out to be the same as the ones of Einstein gravity regardless of the explicit form of the form factors. As a special case the four-graviton scattering amplitudes in Weyl conformal gravity are identically zero. Using a field redefinition, we prove that the outcome is correct for any number of external gravitons (on-shell n−point functions) and in any dimension for a large class of theories. However, when an operator quadratic in the Riemann tensor is added in any dimension (with the exception of the Gauss-Bonnet term in four dimensions) the result is completely altered, and the scattering amplitudes depend on all the form factors introduced in the action.