GAUGE DEPENDENCE IN HIGHER-DERIVATIVE QUANTUM-GRAVITY AND THE CONFORMAL ANOMALY PROBLEM

We examine the gauge dependence in higher derivative quantum gravity and find that a change of gauge condition leads to a variation of the effective action that is proportional to the conformal shift of the classical action. From this follows that one can not explain the appearance of the nonconformal counterterms in the Weyl gravity as the effect of a ''bad'' gauge. The last claim is a serious reasoning in favour of the anomaly origin of Weyl gravity. Moreover we consider a new version of (induced) conformal gravity and find that the gauge dependence in this theory also has no relation to the existence of nonconformal divergencies.