Into the EFThedron and UV constraints from IR consistency

TL;DR

This paper explores the geometric structure of the space of effective field theories with consistent UV completions, revealing connections to moment problems and deriving IR constraints on UV spectra, including bounds on high-spin states.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the EFThedron geometry is given by the convex hull of product of moment curves, providing analytic bounds and linking IR crossing symmetry to UV spectral constraints.

Findings

The EFThedron is described by the convex hull of product of moment curves.

Analytic bounds on UV spectra are derived and match numerical results.

IR crossing symmetry constrains the presence of high-spin states and their spectral ratios.

Abstract

Recently it was proposed that the theory space of effective field theories with consistent UV completions can be described as a positive geometry, termed the EFThedron. In this paper we demonstrate that at the core, the geometry is given by the convex hull of the product of two moment curves. This makes contact with the well studied bi-variate moment problem, which in various instances has known solutions, generalizing the Hankel matrices of couplings into moment matrices. We are thus able to obtain analytic expressions for bounds, which perfectly match numerical results from semi-definite programing methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that crossing symmetry in the IR imposes non-trivial constraints on the UV spectrum. In particular, permutation invariance for identical scalar scattering requires that any UV completion beyond the scalar sector must contain arbitrarily high spins, including at least all even spins $\ell\le28$, with the ratio of spinning spectral functions bounded from above, exhibiting large spin suppression. The spinning spectrum must also include at least one state satisfying a bound $m^2_{J}<M^2 \frac{( J^2-12) ( J^4 - 32 J^2 +204)}{8 (150 - 43 J^2 + 2 J^4)}$, where $J^2=\ell(\ell+1)$, and $M^2$ is the mass of the heaviest spin 2 state in the spectrum.