Calculation of the Graviton Self-Energy Using Dimensional Regularization

One-loop contributions to the graviton self-energy are calculated, in the context of covariant quantization, by employing a modified technique of dimensional regularization and by extending Goldberg's version of the Einstein Lagrangian to n dimensions. It is shown that the sum of the graviton and fictitious-particle contributions to the graviton propagator satisfies Slavnov-Ward identities and that the finite part of this sum can be extracted in a manner consistent with these identities. There are no infrared problems in off-mass-shell Green's functions, and tadpole contributions can consistently be set equal to zero.