In unitarity cut method, compact input of on-shell tree level amplitudes is crucial to simplify calculations. Although BCFW on-shell recursion relation gives very compact tree level amplitudes, they usually contain spurious poles. In this paper, we present a method to deal with this issue and provide explicit simple algebraic functions for various coefficients in the presence of spurious poles. As an application, we present analytic result (not just rational term) for one-loop five gluon A(-++++) with scalar propagator for the first time.
We extend the double copy picture of scattering amplitudes to a class of matrix elements (so-called form factors) that involve local gauge invariant operators. Both the Bern, Carrasco and Johansson (BCJ) and the Kawai, Lewellen and Tye (KLT) formalisms are considered and novel properties are observed. One remarkable feature is that through the double-copy construction, certain spurious poles hidden in the gauge form factors become physical propagators in gravity. This mechanism also reveals new hidden relations for form factors which can be understood as a generalization of the BCJ relations.
Theories with both electric and magnetic charges ("mutually non-local" theories) have several major obstacles to calculating scattering amplitudes. Even when the interaction arises through the kinetic mixing of two, otherwise independent, U(1)'s, so that all low-energy interactions are perturbative, difficulties remain: using a self-dual, local formalism leads to spurious poles at any finite order in perturbation theory. Correct calculations must show how the spurious poles cancel in observable scattering amplitudes. Consistency requires that one type of charge is confined as a result of one o…
We describe the unitarity approach for the numerical computation of two-loop integral coefficients of scattering amplitudes. It is well known that the leading propagator singularities of an amplitude's integrand are related to products of tree amplitudes. At two loops, Feynman diagrams with doubled propagators appear naturally, which lead to subleading pole contributions. In general, it is not known how these contributions can be directly expressed in terms of a product of on-shell tree amplitudes. We present a universal algorithm to extract these subleading pole terms by releasing some of the…
The origin of the spurious poles of the gauge field propagators in the temporal axial and the null-plane gauges is discussed. The conclusion is that these poles do not require any special prescription. They are a manifestation of the fact that that the gauge field acquires a static configuration.
We explain how one-loop amplitudes with massive fermions can be computed using only on-shell information. We first use the spinor-helicity formalism in six dimensions to perform generalised unitarity cuts in $d$ dimensions. We then show that divergent wavefunction cuts can be avoided, and the remaining ambiguities in the renormalised amplitudes can be fixed, by matching to universal infrared poles in $4-2ε$ dimensions and ultraviolet poles in $6-2ε$ dimensions. In the latter case we construct an effective Lagrangian in six dimensions and reduce the additional constraint to an on-shell tree-lev…
We study perturbative unitarity in the scalar sector of the Myers-Pospelov model. The model introduces a preferred four-vector $n$ which breaks Lorentz symmetry and couples to a five-dimension operator. When the preferred four-vector is chosen in the pure timelike or lightlike direction, the model becomes a higher time derivative theory, leading to a cubic dispersion relation. Two of the poles are shown to be perturbatively connected to the standard ones, while a third pole, which we call the Lee-Wick-like pole, is associated to a negative metric, in Hilbert space, threatening the preservation…
We study the final state interaction in 3-pion decay of meson resonances at the Excited Baryon Analysis Center (EBAC) of JLab. We apply the dynamical coupled-channels formulation which has been extensively used by EBAC to extract N* information. The formulation satisfies the 3-pion unitarity condition which has been missed in the existing works with the isobar models. We report the effect of the 3-pion unitarity on the meson resonance pole positions and Dalitz plot.
Using effective-range expansion for the two-body amplitudes may generate spurious sub-threshold poles outside of the convergence range of the expansion. In the infinite volume, the emergence of such poles leads to the inconsistencies in the three-body equations, e.g., to the breakdown of unitarity. We investigate the effect of the spurious poles on the three-body quantization condition in a finite volume and show that it leads to a peculiar dependence of the energy levels on the box size $L$. Furthermore, within a simple model, it is demonstrated that the procedure for the removal of these pol…
We show that t-channel unitarity constraints make it possible to obtain the photon-photon cross sections from the photon-proton and proton-proton cross sections, for Q2<150 GeV2. In order to do so, one must postulate the existence of double-pole or triple-pole singularities in the complex j plane.
Around $θ_π= 90^\circ$, the coupling to the $ρ^\circ N$ channel leads to a good accounting of the charged pion exclusive photoproduction cross section in the energy range 3 $<E_γ<$ 10 GeV, where experimental data exist. Starting from a Regge Pole approach that successfully describes vector meson production, the singular part of the corresponding box diagrams (where the intermediate vector meson-baryon pair propagates on-shell) is evaluated without any further assumptions (unitarity). Such a treatment provides an explanation of the $s^{-7}$ scaling of the cross section. Elastic rescattering of …
We study I=0 $d$ wave $ππ$ scattering phase shift using a proper unitarization approach. It is verified that the $f_2(1270)$ resonance corresponds to a twin pole structure: one on the second sheet, another one on the third sheet. Also we find fair agreement on $f_2(1270)$ pole's mass and width between our results and the PDG values. Besides, our analysis reveals the existence of a virtual state in this channel. Its pole location is determined by fitting experimental data and it is found to be in good agreement with the prediction from chiral perturbation theory. Our analysis demonstrates that …
In this paper we propose a dispersive method to describe two-body scattering with unitarity imposed. This approach is applied to elastic $ππ$ scattering. The amplitudes keep single-channel unitarity and describe the experimental data well, and the low-energy amplitudes are consistent with that of chiral perturbation theory. The pole locations of the $σ$, $f_0(980)$, $ρ(770)$ and $f_2(1270)$ and their couplings to $ππ$ are obtained. A virtual state appearing in the isospin-two S-wave is confirmed. The correlations between the left (and right) hand cut and the poles are discussed. Our results sh…
Next-to-leading order corrections to fragmentation functions in a light-cone gauge are discussed. This gauge simplifies the calculation by eliminating many Feynman diagrams at the expense of introducing spurious poles in loop integrals. As an application, the short-distance coefficients for the color-octet $^3S_1$ term in the fragmentation function for a gluon to split into polarized heavy quarkonium states are re-calculated to order $α_s^2$. We show that the ill-defined spurious poles cancel and the appropriate prescriptions for the remaining spurious poles can be determined by calculating a …
We give a simple proof of perturbative unitarity in gauge theories and quantum gravity using a special gauge that allows us to separate the physical poles of the free propagators, which are quantized by means of the Feynman prescription, from the poles that belong to the gauge-trivial sector, which are quantized by means of the fakeon prescription. The proof applies to renormalizable theories, including the ultraviolet complete theory of quantum gravity with fakeons formulated recently, as well as low-energy (nonrenormalizable) theories. We clarify a number of subtleties related to the study o…
The pion - nucleon scattering phase shifts in $s$ and $p$ waves are analyzed using PKU unitarization approach that can separate the phase shifts into different contributions from poles and branch cuts. It is found that in $S_{11}$ and $P_{11}$ channels, there exist large and positive missing contributions when one compares the phase shift from known resonances plus branch cuts with the experimental data, which indicates that those two channels may contain sizable effects from $N^*(1535)$ and $N^*(1440)$ shadow poles. Those results are obtained using tree level results of the $πN$ amplitude.
We study the three-particle and four-particle scattering amplitudes for an arbitrary, finite number of massive scalars, spinors and vectors by employing the on-shell massive spinor formalism. We consider the most general three-particle amplitudes with energy growing behavior at most of $\mathcal{O} (E)$. This is the special case of the requirement of tree unitarity, which states that the $N$-particle scattering amplitudes at tree-level should grow at most as $\mathcal{O} (E^{4-N})$ in the high energy hard scattering limit, i.e. at fixed non-zero angles. Then the factorizable parts of the four-…
We summarize recent work on the characterization of anomaly poles in connection with the field-theory interpretation of the Green-Schwarz mechanism of anomaly cancellation and on their effective field theories, stressing on the properties of the anomaly vertex in two representations, the Rosenberg and the Longitudinal/Transverse. The presence of polar amplitudes in these theories causes a violation of unitarity at high energy which is cured by the exchange of the axion. We comment on the possible physical implications of this mechanism.
The short-distance coefficients for the color-octet ^3S_1 term in the fragmentation function for a gluon to split into polarized heavy quarkonium states are re-calculated to order alpha_s^2. The light-cone gauge remarkably simplifies the calculation by eliminating many Feynman diagrams at the expense of introducing spurious poles in loop integrals. We do not use any conventional prescriptions for spurious pole. Instead, we only use gauge invariance with the aid of Collins-Soper definition of the fragmentation function. Our result agrees with a previous calculation of Braaten and Lee in the Fey…
A new dispersion relation for the partial wave $ππ$ scattering $S$ matrix is set up. Using the dispersion relation we generalize the single channel unitarity condition, $SS^+=1$, to the entire complex $s$ plane, which is equivalent to the generalized unitarity condition in quantum mechanics. The pole positions of the $σ$ resonance and the $f_0(980)$ resonance are estimated based on the theoretical relations we obtained. The central value of the $σ$ pole position is $M_σ\simeq 410$MeV, $Γ_σ\simeq 550$MeV, obtained after including the the constraint of the Adler zero condition.
We derive analytic expressions for high energy $2 \to 2$ off-shell scattering amplitudes of weak vector bosons. They are obtained from six fermion final states in processes of the type $e^+ e^- \to \barν_e + (WW) + ν_e \to \barν_e + (lν)(lν) + ν_e$. As an application we reconsider the unitarity bounds on the Higgs mass. Particular attention is given to the role of the photon exchange which has not been considered in earlier investigations; we find that the photon weakens the bound of the Higgs mass.
An unambiguous definition of meson resonance masses requires a description of the associated phase shifts in terms of a manifestly unitary $S$-matrix and its complex poles. However, the commonly used Breit-Wigner (BW) parametrisations can lead to appreciable deviations. We demonstrate this for a simple elastic resonance, viz. $ρ(770)$, whose pole and BW masses turn out to differ by almost 5 MeV. In the case of the very broad $f_0(500)$ and $K_0^\star(700)$ scalar mesons, the discrepancies are shown to become much larger, while also putting question marks at the listed PDG BW masses and widths.…
Unitarity cuts are widely used in analytic computation of loop amplitudes in gauge theories such as QCD. We expand upon the technique introduced in hep-ph/0503132 to carry out any finite unitarity cut integral. This technique naturally separates the contributions of bubble, triangle and box integrals in one-loop amplitudes and is not constrained to any particular helicity configurations. Loop momentum integration is reduced to a sequence of algebraic operations. We discuss the extraction of the residues at higher-order poles. Additionally, we offer concise algebraic formulas for expressing coe…
Much of the structure of cosmological correlators is controlled by their singularities, which in turn are fixed in terms of flat-space scattering amplitudes. An important challenge is to interpolate between the singular limits to determine the full correlators at arbitrary kinematics. This is particularly relevant because the singularities of correlators are not directly observable, but can only be accessed by analytic continuation. In this paper, we study rational correlators, including those of gauge fields, gravitons, and the inflaton, whose only singularities at tree level are poles and wh…
Additivity of Breit-Wigner phases has been proposed to describe interfering resonances in partial waves in $ππ$ scattering. This assumption leads to an expression for partial wave amplitudes that involves products of Breit-Wigner amplitudes. We show that this expression is equivalent to a coherent sum of Breit-Wigner amplitudes with specific complex coefficients which depend on the resonance parameters of all contributing resonances. We use analyticity of $ππ$ partial wave amplitudes to show that they must have the form of a coherent sum of Breit-Wigner amplitudes with complex coefficients and…
We discuss the Padé approximation to the $ππ$ scattering amplitudes in 1--loop chiral perturbation theory. The approximation restores unitarity and can reproduce the correct resonance poles, but the approximation violates crossing symmetry and produce spurious poles on the complex $s$ plane and therefore plagues its predictions on physical quantities at quantitative level. However we find that one virtual state in the IJ=20 channel may have physical relevance.
We reconsider two classical proposals for the determination of the angle gamma of the unitarity triangle: B^\pm => chi_{c0} π^\pm => π^+π^-π^\pm and B_s => rho^0 K_S => π^+ π^- K_S. We point out the relevance, in both cases, of non resonant amplitudes, where the π^+ π^- pair is produced by weak decay of a B^* (J^P=1^-) or B_0 (J^P=0^+) off-shell meson. In particular, for the B decay channel, the inclusion of the B_0 pole completes some previous analyses and confirms their conclusions, provided a suitable cut in the Dalitz plot is performed; for the B_s decay the inclusion of the B^*, B_0 ampli…
We analyze the effective actions of anomalous models in which a four-dimensional version of the Green-Schwarz mechanism is invoked for the cancellation of the anomalies, and we compare it with those models in which gauge invariance is restored by the presence of a Wess-Zumino term. Some issues concerning an apparent violation of unitarity of the mechanism, which requires Dolgov-Zakharov poles, are carefully examined, using a class of amplitudes studied in the past by Bouchiat-Iliopoulos-Meyer (BIM), and elaborating on previous studies. In the Wess-Zumino case we determine explicitly the unitar…
Most of exotic resonances observed in the past decade appear as peak structure near some threshold. These near-threshold phenomena can be interpreted as genuine resonant states or enhanced threshold cusps. Apparently, there is no straightforward way of distinguishing the two structures. In this work, we employ the strength of deep feed-forward neural network in classifying objects with almost similar features. We construct a neural network model with scattering amplitude as input and nature of pole causing the enhancement as output. The training data is generated by an S-matrix satisfying the …
We assess the importance of final state interactions in $D^+ \rar K^- \p^+ \p^+$, stressing the consistency between two- and three-body interactions. The basic building block in the calculation is a $Kπ$ amplitude based on unitarized chiral perturbation theory and with parameters determined by a fit to elastic LASS data. Its analytic extension to the second sheet allows the determination of two poles, associated with the $\k$ and the $K^*(1430)$, and a representation of the amplitude based on them is constructed. The problem of unitarity in the three-body system is formulated in terms of an in…
