Quark and gluon contributions to the QCD trace anomaly

We show that, in dimensional reguralization in the minimal subtraction scheme, the QCD trace anomaly can be unambiguously decomposed into two parts coming from the renormalized quark and gluon energy momentum tensors. We carry out this decomposition at the two-loop level. The result can be used to constrain the renormalization group properties of the nucleon’s twist-four gravitational form factor ${\bar{C}}_{q,g}$.