Photon propagators and the definition and approximation of renormalized stress tensors in curved space-time

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Abstract
We present the symmetric Hadamard representation for scalar and photon Feynman Green’s functions. We use these representations to give a simple definition for their associated renormalized stress tensors. We investigate the connection between the accuracy of the WKB approximation and the vanishing of the trace anomaly for these fields. We show that, although for scalars there is a direct connection, this is not true for photons, and we discuss the relevance of these results to the approximation of renormalized stress tensors in static Einstein space-times.