Ultra-Planckian quark and gluon scattering in agravity

TL;DR

This paper studies high-energy quark and gluon scattering via graviton exchange in Agravity, showing amplitudes scale as 1/s at ultra-Planckian energies, supporting its UV completeness and unitarity.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of tree-level scattering amplitudes involving matter in Agravity at trans-Planckian energies, demonstrating their expected high-energy behavior.

Findings

Amplitudes scale as 1/s at high energies.

IR divergences are regularized by quark masses.

Supports Agravity as a UV-complete, perturbatively unitary theory.

Abstract

We investigate tree-level scattering processes involving quarks ($q$) and gluons ($g$) mediated by graviton exchange in the framework of Agravity, a dimensionless and renormalizable theory of quadratic quantum gravity. Focusing on the ultra-Planckian regime, characterized by the Mandelstam variable $s = (p_1 + p_2)^2$, which corresponds to the total energy squared in the center-of-momentum frame, being much larger than any particle mass scale, we compute the squared amplitudes and analyze the differential cross sections for the processes $gg \to gg$, $gg \to q\bar{q}$, $gq \to gq$, and $qq \to qq$. We demonstrate that all amplitudes scale as $1/s$ at high energies, in agreement with expectations for a UV-complete theory of gravity. In addition, we explore the issue of unitarity in the presence of higher-derivative ghost modes by analyzing the positivity properties of the squared amplitudes. While IR divergences appear in the forward scattering of massless particles, we show that these are regularized by finite quark masses. Our findings support the viability of Agravity as a perturbatively unitary and UV-complete extension of general relativity, capable of consistently describing gravitational interactions among elementary matter fields at trans-Planckian energies.