Consistent Scattering Amplitudes, Yang-Mills, the Higgs Mechanism and the EFTs Beyond

TL;DR

This paper explores fundamental constraints on scattering amplitudes in 4d, deriving new conditions for massless and massive particles, and elucidating the structure of EFTs, including the necessity of the Higgs mechanism for unitarity.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of constraints on 2-to-2 scattering amplitudes, revealing the geometric and algebraic structures underlying gauge theories and EFTs, and unifies these insights with supersymmetric amplitudes.

Findings

Complete structure of gluon three-particle amplitudes derived.

Conditions for energy growth suppression in massive vector boson scattering identified.

Unitarity constraints lead to the necessity of the Higgs mechanism in certain EFTs.

Abstract

I study constraints on fundamental physics emerging from consistency of a unitary, local and perturbative $S$-matrix in $4d$. For massless particles, some new constraints arising from consistent complex factorisation of $2\rightarrow 2$ amplitudes are derived, leading, in particular, to the complete structure of the gluon three-particle amplitudes, including the geometric restrictions on the Lie algebra, parity and time-reversal symmetry, among other details. For massive particles, a hierarchy of constraints may be derived instead by imposing a maximum rate of unitarity-violating growth in the high energy limit. All $2\rightarrow 2$ tree-level amplitudes of massive particles with spin $s\leq 1$ are calculated in generality using on-shell methods and presented with manifest high energy dependence. The anatomy of these amplitudes' helicity sectors is dissected in order to identify conditions under which their energy growth is limited or eliminated. Using these results, it is shown that the scattering of massive vector bosons has suppressed, but not fully unitarised, high energy dependence if the parity-conserving parts of their self-couplings are Lie algebra structure constants, possibly non-semisimple or non-compact, and the parity-violating parts are ``generalised Chern-Simons terms''. Full unitarisation then requires the standard Yang-Mills Lie algebra properties and, for a gapped spectrum, the Higgs mechanism. These amplitudes are assembled, embedded and unified into elegant superamplitudes in theories with extended supersymmetry when the particles are BPS. More generally, a broader landscape of EFTs is charted through various combinations of constraints and coupling hierarchies.