Unitarizing non-relativistic scattering

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive unitarization scheme for non-relativistic scattering amplitudes, addressing elastic and inelastic channels, and introduces methods to handle non-analytic behaviors and bound states, with applications to dark matter.

Contribution

It presents a novel, complete unitarization framework for non-relativistic scattering that incorporates inelastic effects, non-analytic behaviors, and bound states, with two derivations and renormalization procedures.

Findings

Derived anti-Hermitian kernels from unitarity and LSZ reduction.

Extended unitarization to non-analytic and divergent amplitudes.

Provided renormalization methods ensuring finite, unitary cross-sections.

Abstract

Unitarity imposes coupled constraints on elastic and inelastic amplitudes. Satisfying them requires resummation of the self-energy contributions from both elastic and inelastic channels. Inelastic channels generate anti-Hermitian contributions that can be consistently deduced from the unitarity relation underlying the optical theorem, leading to non-local separable potentials and a compact, unique and complete unitarization scheme in the non-relativistic regime. We present two alternative derivations of the anti-Hermitian kernel, from the continuity equation combined with LSZ reduction, and by integrating out inelastic channels. We further extend the unitarization framework to treat non-analytic and non-convergent behavior of inelastic amplitudes in the complex momentum plane and to incorporate bound states. For non-convergent amplitudes, we demonstrate two renormalization procedures in which anti-Hermitian separable potentials necessarily induce Hermitian separable counterterms, yielding finite cross-sections consistent with unitarity. These results provide a general tool for non-relativistic scattering, with clear applications to dark-matter phenomenology.