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Related papers: Causality bounds on scalar-tensor EFTs

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Using unitarity and causality, we derive an infinite tower of two-sided positivity bounds on the effective field theory coefficients which describe the propagation of heavy fields on de Sitter spacetime. We design this EFT to describe…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-12-25 Mang Hei Gordon Lee , Scott Melville

We show how calculable IR loop effects impact positivity bounds in Effective Field Theories with causal and unitary UV completions. We identify infrared singularities which appear in dispersion relations at $|t|\lesssim m^2$. In the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-11-23 Brando Bellazzini , Marc Riembau , Francesco Riva

The prospect of detecting/constraining deviations from general relativity by studying gravitational waves (GWs) from merging black holes has been one of the primary motivations of GW interferometers like LIGO/Virgo. Within pure gravity, the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-11-27 Alexander Cassem , Mark P. Hertzberg

Motivated by scalar-tensor gravities, we consider a theory which contains massless scalar fields with different sound speeds. We derive unitarity relations for partial wave amplitudes of $2 \to 2$ scattering, with explicit formulas for…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-06-09 Y. Ageeva , P. Petrov

SMEFT Wilson coefficients are subject to various positivity bounds in order to be consistent with the fundamental principles of S-matrix. Previous bounds on dimension-8 SMEFT operators have been obtained using the positivity part of UV…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2024-03-12 Qing Chen , Ken Mimasu , Tong Arthur Wu , Guo-Dong Zhang , Shuang-Yong Zhou

Weak gravity conjecture can be formulated as a statement that gravity must be the weakest force, compared to the other interactions in low energy effective field theory (EFT). Several arguments in favor of this statement were presented from…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-07-25 Anna Tokareva , Yongjun Xu

Positivity bounds are bounds on the Wilson coefficients of an effective field theory. They hold, if the ultraviolet completion satisfies unitarity, microcausality, locality and Lorentz symmetry; accordingly their violation signals a…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2024-05-16 Astrid Eichhorn , Andreas Odgaard Pedersen , Marc Schiffer

We analyze constraints from perturbative unitarity and crossing on the leading contributions of higher-dimension operators to the four-graviton amplitude in four spacetime dimensions, including constraints that follow from distinct helicity…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-05-03 Zvi Bern , Dimitrios Kosmopoulos , Alexander Zhiboedov

We distinguish between the notions of asymptotic causality and infrared causality for gravitational effective field theories, and show that the latter gives constraints consistent with gravitational positivity bounds. We re-explore the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-03-23 Calvin Y. -R. Chen , Claudia de Rham , Aoibheann Margalit , Andrew J. Tolley

We show that the tree-level spectrum of heavy particles can be directly extracted from the Wilson coefficients of the corresponding effective field theory at low energies. This procedure is exact when the number of resonances is finite, and…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2026-04-20 Francesco Calisto , Clifford Cheung , Grant N. Remmen , Francesco Sciotti , Michele Tarquini

We find the complete set of conditions satisfied by the forward $2\to2$ scattering amplitude in unitarity and causal theories. These are based on an infinite set of energy dependent quantities -- the arcs -- which are dispersively expressed…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2021-10-12 Brando Bellazzini , Joan Elias Miró , Riccardo Rattazzi , Marc Riembau , Francesco Riva

Effective field theories (EFT) parameterize the long-distance effects of short-distance dynamics whose details may or may not be known. It is known that EFT coefficients must obey certain positivity constraints if causality and unitarity…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2021-06-16 Simon Caron-Huot , Vincent Van Duong

We study models that give rise to scalar-tensor effective field theories (EFTs) at low energies. Our framework involves massive particles of spin $S=0, 1/2, 1$ coupled to gravity and to a real massless scalar in the UV. Integrating out the…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-07-16 Edoardo Alviani , Adam Falkowski , Panagiotis Marinellis

Sources of long wavelength radiation are naturally described by an effective field theory (EFT) which takes the form of a multipole expansion. Its action is given by a derivative expansion where higher order terms are suppressed by powers…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2013-05-30 Andreas Ross

Positivity bounds are theoretical constraints on the Wilson coefficients of an effective field theory. These bounds emerge from the requirement that a given effective field theory must be the low-energy limit of a relativistic quantum…

We bound EFT coefficients appearing in $2 \to 2$ photon scattering amplitudes in four dimensions. After reviewing unitarity and positivity conditions in this context, we use dispersion relations and crossing symmetry to compute sum rules…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-09-27 Johan Henriksson , Brian McPeak , Francesco Russo , Alessandro Vichi

Understanding the implication of positivity bounds on loop-generated dim-8 operator coefficients is a nontrivial task, as these bounds only strictly hold when all the contributions are included in the dispersion relation up to a certain…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2025-10-14 Yunxiao Ye , Xiao Cao , Yu-Hang Wu , Jiayin Gu

Causality in a shockwave state is related to the analytic properties of a four-point correlation function. Extending recent results for scalar probes, we show that this constrains the couplings of the stress tensor to light spinning…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2018-06-20 Thomas Hartman , Sachin Jain , Sandipan Kundu

We study bounds arising from the analyticity and unitarity of scattering amplitudes in the context of effective field theories with massless particles. We provide an approach that only uses dispersion relations away from the forward limit.…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-10-10 Carl Beadle , Giulia Isabella , Davide Perrone , Sara Ricossa , Francesco Riva , Francesco Serra

We study the space of $2\to 2$ scattering amplitudes of neutral Goldstone bosons in four space-time dimensions. We establish universal bounds on the first two non-universal Wilson coefficients of the low energy Effective Field Theory (EFT)…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2023-10-12 Francesca Acanfora , Andrea Guerrieri , Kelian Häring , Denis Karateev