A note on the improvement ambiguity of the stress tensor and the critical limits of correlation functions

I study various properties of the critical limits of correlators containing insertions of conserved and anomalous currents. In particular, I show that the improvement term of the stress tensor can be fixed unambiguously, studying the RG interpolation between the UV and IR limits. The removal of the improvement ambiguity is encoded in a variational principle, which makes use of sum rules for the trace anomalies a and a('). Compatible results follow from the analysis of the RG equations. I perform a number of self-consistency checks and discuss the issues in a large set of theories. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.