English

Partial-Wave Unitarity Bounds on Higher-Dimensional Operators from 2-to-$N$ Scattering

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-02-06 v2

Abstract

We present a systematic method for deriving partial-wave unitarity bounds on Wilson coefficients of higher-dimensional operators in effective field theories involving more than four fields, which naturally appear in tree-level 2-to-NN scattering processes with N3N \geq 3. Unlike 2-to-2 scattering, 2-to-NN scattering with N3N \geq 3 features multiple amplitudes associated with the same total angular momentum. To resolve these degeneracies, we provide a way to construct an orthonormal amplitude basis by parameterizing the phase space manifold of massless particles using spinor-helicity variables, enabling analytical integration over the phase space with arbitrary particle numbers. We provide Mathematica code to analytically evaluate phase space integrals of interference between two local on-shell amplitudes up to four final-state particles, with straightforward generalization to NN final-state particles. As practical applications, we demonstrate the use of this tool by deriving unitarity bounds on some dimension-7 and dimension-8 operators in the Standard Model effective field theory involving five and six fields, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.15524,
  title  = {Partial-Wave Unitarity Bounds on Higher-Dimensional Operators from 2-to-$N$ Scattering},
  author = {Céline Degrande and Hao-Lin Li and Ling-Xiao Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.15524},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:45:31.802Z