English

Exploring Inelasticity in the S-Matrix Bootstrap

High Energy Physics - Theory 2023-10-12 v3

Abstract

The modern S-Matrix Bootstrap provides non-perturbative bounds on low-energy aspects of scattering amplitudes, leveraging the constraints of unitarity, analyticity and crossing. Typically, the solutions saturating such bounds also saturate the unitarity constraint as much as possible, meaning that they are almost exclusively elastic. This is expected to be unphysical in d>2d>2 because of Aks' theorem. We explore this issue by adding inelasticity as an additional input, both using a primal approach in general dimensions which extends the usual ansatz, and establishing a dual formulation in the 2d case. We then measure the effects on the low-energy observables where we observe stronger bounds than in the standard setup.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.13219,
  title  = {Exploring Inelasticity in the S-Matrix Bootstrap},
  author = {António Antunes and Miguel S. Costa and José Pereira},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.13219},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

8 pages, 14 figures; v2 minor modifications; v3 improved discussion, matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:27:21.441Z