English

New fermionic soft theorems

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-07-23 v2

Abstract

Soft limits of massless S-matrix are known to reflect symmetries of the theory. In particular for theories with Goldstone bosons, the double-soft limit of scalars reveals the coset structure of the vacuum manifold. In this letter, we propose that such universal double-soft behavior is not only true for scalars, but also for spin-1/2 particles in four dimensions and fermions in three dimensions. We first consider Akulov-Volkov theory, and demonstrate the double soft-limit of goldstinos yields the supersymmetry algebra. More surprisingly we also find amplitudes in 3<N<=8 supergravity theories in four dimensions as well as N=16 supergravity in three dimensions behave universally in the double-soft-fermion limit, analogue to the scalar ones. The validity of the new soft theorems at loop level is also studied. The results for supergravity are beyond what is implied by SUSY Ward identities, and may impose non-trivial constraints on the possible counter terms for supergravity theories.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1412.1809,
  title  = {New fermionic soft theorems},
  author = {Wei-Ming Chen and Yu-tin Huang and Congkao Wen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.1809},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, V2 typos fixed published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T07:21:01.389Z