Unitarizing non-relativistic scattering
Abstract
Unitarity imposes coupled constraints on elastic and inelastic amplitudes. Satisfying them requires resummation of the self-energy contributions from both elastic and inelastic channels. Inelastic channels generate anti-Hermitian contributions that can be consistently deduced from the unitarity relation underlying the optical theorem, leading to non-local separable potentials and a compact, unique and complete unitarization scheme in the non-relativistic regime. We present two alternative derivations of the anti-Hermitian kernel, from the continuity equation combined with LSZ reduction, and by integrating out inelastic channels. We further extend the unitarization framework to treat non-analytic and non-convergent behavior of inelastic amplitudes in the complex momentum plane and to incorporate bound states. For non-convergent amplitudes, we demonstrate two renormalization procedures in which anti-Hermitian separable potentials necessarily induce Hermitian separable counterterms, yielding finite cross-sections consistent with unitarity. These results provide a general tool for non-relativistic scattering, with clear applications to dark-matter phenomenology.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.02097,
title = {Unitarizing non-relativistic scattering},
author = {Marcos M. Flores and Kalliopi Petraki},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02097},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
58 pages, 1 figure, discussion expanded, version accepted for publication in JHEP