Renormalization introduces an arbitrary renormalization scale even though the classical massless theory has no dimensionful parameter. Independence of the bare correlation function from that auxiliary scale gives the Callan-Symanzik equation
Here
is the beta function and is the field anomalous dimension, with its sign fixed by the displayed equation. The beta function determines the running coupling. Its zeros are renormalization-group fixed points, where the theory can become scale invariant. A positive beta function makes a positive coupling increase toward larger , while a negative one makes it decrease.
For the propagator coefficient , follow a characteristic with and . The equation becomes
Integration gives
with
For with , the only real fixed point is . It is ultraviolet-attractive: the theory is asymptotically free. Integrating the running equation gives
or
for the branch with the same sign as . The perturbative expression has an infrared Landau pole at
and therefore
Finally set and use . The characteristic factor becomes
In terms of the dynamically generated scale,
For a renormalized -point one-particle-irreducible function, the Callan-Symanzik equation is
with a convention-dependent sign on . At this order .
At a general Euclidean momentum scale , the one-loop four-point function contains
Requiring a physical amplitude to be independent of the arbitrary subtraction scale gives
and therefore