The nucleus-nucleus Glauber amplitude in the tree approximation is studied for heavy participant nuclei. It is shown that, contrary to previous published results, it is not unitary for realistic values of nucleon-nucleon cross-sections.
We study perturbative unitarity and electroweak oblique corrections in the electroweak symmetry breaking models including an arbitrary number of neutral Higgs bosons. Requiring the perturbative unitarity of the high energy scattering amplitudes of weak gauge bosons and the neutral Higgs bosons at tree level, we obtain a set of conditions among the Higgs coupling strengths (unitarity sum rules). It is shown that the unitarity sum rules require the tree level rho parameter to be 1 if there are only neutral Higgs bosons. Moreover, we find that the one-loop finiteness of the electroweak oblique co…
We extract the Glauber divergences from the spectator amplitudes for two-body hadronic decays $B \to M_1 M_2$ in the $k_T$ factorization theorem, where $M_2$ denotes the meson emitted at the weak vertex. Employing the eikonal approximation, the divergences are factorized into the corresponding Glauber phase factors associated with the $M_1$ and $M_2$ mesons. It is observed that the latter factor enhances the spectator contribution to the color-suppressed tree amplitude by modifying the interference pattern between the two involved leading-order diagrams. The first factor rotates the enhanced s…
The Abelian Higgs model forms an essential part of the electroweak standard model: it is the sector containing only Z and Higgs bosons. We present a diagram-based proof of the tree-level unitarity of this model inside the unitary gauge, where only physical degrees of freedom occur. We derive combinatorial recursion relations for off-shell amplitudes in the massless approximation, which allows us to prove the cancellation of the first two orders in energy of unitarity-violating high-energy behaviour for any tree-level amplitude in this model. We describe a deformation of the amplitudes by exten…
The tree-loop duality relation is used as a starting point to derive the constraints of causality and unitarity. Specifically, the Bogoliubov causality condition is ab initio derived at the individual graph level. It leads to a representation of a graph in terms of lower order cut graphs. Extracting the absorptive part gives then the general unitarity relation (Cutkosky rule). The derivation, being carried out directly in momentum space, holds for any local (polynomial) hermitian interaction vertices. This is in contrast to the technical difficulties arising from contact terms in the spacetime…
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 present the first comprehensive analysis of the unitarity thresholds and anomalous thresholds of scattering amplitudes at two loops and beyond based on the loop-tree duality, and show how non-causal unphysical thresholds are locally cancelled in an efficient way when the forest of all the dual on-shell cuts is considered as one. We also prove that soft and collinear singularities at two loops and beyond are restricted to a compact region of the loop three-momenta, which is a necessary condition for implementing a local cancellation of loop infrared singularities with the ones appearing in r…
We calculate the tree-level amplitudes for electrically neutral $2\to2$ scattering for the Standard Model Higgs doublet non-minimally coupled to the Ricci scalar. We consider both the metric and the Palatini formulation of gravity. We find the partial wave unitarity limit for a general background field value. Our results are in agreement with previous work. In the electroweak vacuum, tree-level unitarity is violated at $\sim M_\text{Planck}/ξ$ in the metric formulation, and at $\sim M_\text{Planck}/\sqrtξ$ in the Palatini formulation. In the inflationary large field background, the unitarity l…
Any loop QCD amplitude at full colour is constructed from kinematic and gauge-group building blocks. In a unitarity-based on-shell framework, both objects can be reconstructed from their respective counterparts in tree-level amplitudes. This procedure is at its most powerful when aligned with flexible colour decompositions of tree-level QCD amplitudes. In this note we derive such decompositions for amplitudes with an arbitrary number of quarks and gluons from the same principle that is used to bootstrap kinematics - unitarity factorisation. In the process we formulate new multi-quark bases and…
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…
A spontaneously broken SU(2) theory is the simplest generalization of the Abelian Higgs model, containing three equally massive vector bosons and a single Higgs scalar. A strictly diagrammatic proof is presented of the tree-level unitarity of this model in the unitary gauge, i.e. employing only physical fields. A new Ward-like identity is used to show that the high-energy behaviour of all amplitudes cannot be more than quadratic; the use of generating functions for all off-shell amplitudes then leads to the unitarity proof.
Partial-Wave Unitarity Bounds on Higher-Dimensional Operators from 2-to-$N$ Scattering
Universite Catholique de Louvain(天主教鲁汶大学);School of Physics, Sun Yat-Sen University(中山大学物理学院);Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics(阿卜杜勒·萨拉姆国际理论物理中心)
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 present the first public version of Caravel, a C++17 framework for the computation of multi-loop scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory, based on the numerical unitarity method. Caravel is composed of modules for the $D$-dimensional decomposition of integrands of scattering amplitudes into master and surface terms, the computation of tree-level amplitudes in floating point or finite-field arithmetic, the numerical computation of one- and two-loop amplitudes in QCD and Einstein gravity, and functional reconstruction tools. We provide programs that showcase Caravel's main functionaliti…
Here we discuss color-kinematics duality for higher-derivative QCD-like amplitudes. We explicitly show that the duality still holds in this case and it can be instrumental in constructing the associated quadratic-gravity amplitudes by using the double-copy prescription. This allows one to drastically simplify calculations. We also evaluate some tree-level Compton scattering amplitudes in higher-derivative Yang-Mills and quadratic gravity coupled with matter. Furthermore, we illustrate the application of generalized unitarity method for both cases by studying a specific one-loop amplitude.
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 present a set of relations between one-loop integral coefficients for dimensionally regulated QCD amplitudes. Within dimensional regularization, the combined use of color-kinematics duality and integrand reduction yields the existence of relations between the integrand residues of partial amplitudes with different orderings of the external particles. These relations can be established for the cut-constructible contributions as well for the ones responsible for rational terms. Starting from the general parametrization of one-loop residues and applying Laurent expansion in order to extract th…
We formulate a generalization of Higgs effective field theory (HEFT) including arbitrary number of extra neutral and charged Higgs bosons (generalized HEFT, GHEFT) to describe non-minimal electroweak symmetry breaking models. Using the geometrical form of the GHEFT Lagrangian, which can be regarded as a nonlinear sigma model on a scalar manifold, it is shown that the scalar boson scattering amplitudes are described in terms of the Riemann curvature tensor (geometry) of the scalar manifold and the covariant derivatives of the potential. The coefficients of the one-loop divergent terms in the ob…
We perform the calculation for tree-level ultraviolet unitarity violation scales for scalar-$R^2$ inflation models by including an additional $R^2 |Φ|^2$-type term. Due to certain constraints, we resort to the Einstein frame for our calculations, where we separate our analysis between metric and Palatini formulations. We follow recent works in this line that debunk the naive predictions for unitarity violations in Higgs' inflation models to determine how to accurately estimate the behaviour of scattering amplitudes in the UV limit. Later, we work out different cases by assuming potentials corr…
The UT plots played already for three decades an important role in the tests of the SM and the determination of the CKM parameters. As of 2022, among the four CKM parameters, $V_{us}$ and $β$ are already measured with respectable precision, while this is not the case of $|V_{cb}|$ and $γ$. In the case of $|V_{cb}|$ the main obstacle are the significant tensions between its inclusive and exclusive determinations from tree-level decays. The present uncertainty in $γ$ of $4^\circ$ from tree-level decays will be reduced to $1^\circ$ by the LHCb and Belle II collaborations in the coming years. Unfo…
We compute the $2\rightarrow 2$ gravitino scattering amplitudes at tree level in supergravity theories where supersymmetry is spontaneously broken. In the unitary gauge, the gravitino becomes massive (of mass $m_{3/2}$) by absorbing the Goldstino, and the scattering amplitudes of its longitudinal polarisations grow with energy as $κ^2 E^4/m_{3/2}^2$, signaling a potential breakdown of unitarity at a scale $Λ^2\sim m_{3/2}/κ\sim M_{\mathrm{SUSY}}^2$. As we show explicitly in the Polonyi model, this leading term is cancelled by the contributions coming from the scalar partner of the Goldstino (s…