  With the present trend in experimental particle physics of probing yet
shorter distances and with the requirement on the theoretical side of
renormalizability, conformal invariance becomes an attractive symmetry for
particle interactions. That is because conformal field theories form a large
class of massless no-scale renormalizable quantum field theories. It is
generally believed, however, that renormalization breaks conformal invariance
and with the absence of a reported success to find a conformally invariant
renormalization scheme, an alternative approach is followed in this thesis. We
begin with a conformally invariant theory and study the implications of such
idealization. Conformal field theories are populated with new gauge degrees of
freedom and the inclusion, in a natural way, of these auxiliary fields may
improve the renormalization program. Another remarkable property is the
presence of the vacuum mode in the physical subspace of the gauge potential,
believed to be associated with spontaneously generated gauge theories called
"zero-center modules." In spite of all the work that has been done over the
years on conformal field theories, conformal electrodynamics has remained only
partially developed. New results...(more)
