LUIGI DELLE ROSE Dipartimento di Fisica e Matematica Università del Salento e INFN di Lecce. The coupling of an ordinary quantum field theory to a gravitational background provides significant information concerning the interaction of matter with gravity and allows to study in a systematic way the origin of the conformal anomaly. We present a complete one-loop computation of the anomalous efective action describing the coupling of gravity with the Standard Model and showing the appearance of massless effective degrees of freedom directly related to the conformal anomaly. These induce a new scalar interaction with the gauge fields.

DATA: 20-05-2013