High-energy behavior of scattering amplitudes in theories with purely virtual particles

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Piva, Marco
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Piva, Marco
author_facet Piva, Marco
contents We study a class of renormalizable quantum field theories with purely virtual particles that exhibits nonrenormalizable behavior in the high-energy limit of scattering cross sections, which grow as powers of the center-of-mass energy squared and seems to violate unitarity bounds. We point out that the problem should be viewed as a violation of perturbativity, instead of unitarity, and show that the resummation of self energies fixes the issue. As an explicit example, we consider a class of $O(N)$ theories at the leading order in the large-$N$ expansion and show that the different quantization prescription of purely virtual particles takes care of the nonrenormalizable behavior, making the resummed cross sections to decrease at high energies and the amplitudes to satisfy the unitarity bounds. We compare the results to the case of theories with ghosts, where the resummation cannot change the behavior of cross sections due to certain cancellations in the high-energy expansion of the self energies. These results are particularly relevant for quantum gravity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_09045
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle High-energy behavior of scattering amplitudes in theories with purely virtual particles
Piva, Marco
High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
We study a class of renormalizable quantum field theories with purely virtual particles that exhibits nonrenormalizable behavior in the high-energy limit of scattering cross sections, which grow as powers of the center-of-mass energy squared and seems to violate unitarity bounds. We point out that the problem should be viewed as a violation of perturbativity, instead of unitarity, and show that the resummation of self energies fixes the issue. As an explicit example, we consider a class of $O(N)$ theories at the leading order in the large-$N$ expansion and show that the different quantization prescription of purely virtual particles takes care of the nonrenormalizable behavior, making the resummed cross sections to decrease at high energies and the amplitudes to satisfy the unitarity bounds. We compare the results to the case of theories with ghosts, where the resummation cannot change the behavior of cross sections due to certain cancellations in the high-energy expansion of the self energies. These results are particularly relevant for quantum gravity.
title High-energy behavior of scattering amplitudes in theories with purely virtual particles
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09045