Spectroscopy instead of scattering: particle experimentation in AdS spacetime

TL;DR

This paper explores how anti-de Sitter spacetime can serve as a resonant cavity to enhance particle interactions, allowing spectroscopic data to reveal effects of tiny couplings that are hard to detect in flat spacetime.

Contribution

It proposes using AdS spacetime's resonant properties to amplify nonlinear interactions, enabling detection of small couplings through spectroscopic energy level shifts.

Findings

AdS spacetime enhances nonlinear interactions regardless of coupling strength.

Spectroscopic energy level splittings encode interaction effects.

Long-time evolution causes wavefunction components to drift out-of-phase, revealing tiny interactions.

Abstract

Particle experiments are difficult at weak coupling because interactions are rare and a huge number of collision attempts are needed to attain significant precision. One often hears that "one Higgs boson is produced in a billion of collisions at LHC." In this essay, we fantasize about possible advantages afforded in this regard by performing experiments in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime instead of a usual collider in a nearly-flat spacetime. Being a perfectly resonant cavity, the AdS spacetime enhances all nonlinear interactions, which therefore produce effects of order one no matter how small the couplings are, provided that one waits long enough. These effects are encoded in spectroscopic data, namely, the fine splittings of the energy levels which would have been highly degenerate in AdS if no interactions were present. Over long times, such energy shifts let different components of wavefunctions drift completely out-of-phase, producing large effects for arbitrarily small interactions.