Spontaneous breaking of conformal invariance and trace anomaly matching

We argue that when conformal symmetry is spontaneously broken the trace anomalies in the broken and unbroken phases are matched. This puts strong constraints on the various couplings of the dilaton. Using the uniqueness of the effective action for the Goldstone supermultiplet for broken N = 1 superconformal symmetry the dilaton effective action is calculated. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.