Gravity and the neutral currents: Effective interactions from the trace anomaly

We present a complete study of the one graviton-two neutral gauge bosons vertex at 1-loop level in the electroweak theory. This vertex provides the leading contribution to the interaction between the standard model and gravity, mediated by the trace anomaly, at first order in the inverse Planck mass and at second order in the electroweak expansion. At the same time, these corrections are significant for precision studies of models with low scale gravity at the LHC. We show, in analogy with previous results in the QED and QCD cases, that the anomalous interaction between gravity and the gauge current of the standard model, due to the trace anomaly, is mediated, in each gauge-invariant sector, by effective massless scalar degrees of freedom. We derive the Ward and Slavnov-Taylor identities characterizing the vertex. Our analysis includes the contributions from the improvements of the scalar sector, induced by a conformally coupled Higgs sector in curved space. © 2011 American Physical Society.