Self-healing unitarity is an optical illusion

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the concept of self-healing unitarity in Higgs inflation models, revealing that it does not genuinely restore unitarity but is an optical illusion due to underlying constraints.

Contribution

The study provides a detailed analysis showing that self-healing unitarity does not overcome perturbative unitarity bounds as previously thought.

Findings

Self-healing unitarity does not restore unitarity in Higgs inflation models.

Underlying constraints limit the effectiveness of self-healing unitarity.

Perturbative unitarity bounds remain valid despite self-healing attempts.

Abstract

Among the vast variety of proposals put forward by the community to resolve tree-level unitarity violations in Higgs inflation models, there exists the concept of self-healing. It heals the theory from supposed tree-level violations for elastic scattering processes by summing over successive vacuum polarization loop corrections. In this work, we examine this technique to check whether unitarity is indeed restored and find that there exist underlying constraints in self-healing unitarity that pose the same perturbative unitarity bounds that it was expected to heal.