Soft unification of exceptional effective field theories in de Sitter space
Abstract
We uncover a surprising universal soft behaviour (USB) of a de Sitter (dS) S-matrix for \textit{all} exceptional effective field theories (EFTs) in dS space, stemming from the recently proposed generalised energy conservation (GEC) condition. At leading order in the soft limit, the dS S-matrices for all exceptional EFTs in four spacetime dimensions exhibit no scaling with the soft momentum, i.e. , a feature we term USB. We specifically show that USB fixes the four-point amplitudes in Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) theory and Special Galileon, and six-point amplitude in Non-Linear Sigma Model (NLSM) given the minimal derivative count. We then conjecture USB fixes the interactions of all exceptional EFTs to all orders, thereby providing a unification criterion for them. Our result further underpins the idea that exceptional theories in dS are characterised by the spectrum and stability requirement alone, resonating with the low energy theory of gravity--General Relativity.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.08979,
title = {Soft unification of exceptional effective field theories in de Sitter space},
author = {Zong-Zhe Du},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08979},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Typo fixed