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Title: Universal bound on the strong coupling scale of a gravitationally coupled massive spin-2 particle

Abstract

We find a model-independent upper bound on the strong coupling scale for a massive spin-2 particle coupled to Einstein gravity. Our approach is to directly construct tree-level scattering amplitudes for these degrees of freedom and use them to find the maximum scale of perturbative unitarity violation. The highest scale is Λ3 = (m2MP)1/3, which is saturated by ghost-free bigravity. The strong coupling scale can be further raised to MP if the kinetic term for one particle has the wrong sign, which uniquely gives the amplitudes of quadratic curvature gravity. We also discuss the generalization to massive higher-spin particles coupled to gravity.

Authors:
;
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Case Western Reserve Univ., Cleveland, OH (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
OSTI Identifier:
1477565
Alternate Identifier(s):
OSTI ID: 1613134
Grant/Contract Number:  
SC0019143
Resource Type:
Published Article
Journal Name:
Physical Review D
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Name: Physical Review D Journal Volume: 98 Journal Issue: 8; Journal ID: ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical Society
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS; Astronomy & Astrophysics; Physics; Effective field theory

Citation Formats

Bonifacio, James, and Hinterbichler, Kurt. Universal bound on the strong coupling scale of a gravitationally coupled massive spin-2 particle. United States: N. p., 2018. Web. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.98.085006.
Bonifacio, James, & Hinterbichler, Kurt. Universal bound on the strong coupling scale of a gravitationally coupled massive spin-2 particle. United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.085006
Bonifacio, James, and Hinterbichler, Kurt. Mon . "Universal bound on the strong coupling scale of a gravitationally coupled massive spin-2 particle". United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.085006.
@article{osti_1477565,
title = {Universal bound on the strong coupling scale of a gravitationally coupled massive spin-2 particle},
author = {Bonifacio, James and Hinterbichler, Kurt},
abstractNote = {We find a model-independent upper bound on the strong coupling scale for a massive spin-2 particle coupled to Einstein gravity. Our approach is to directly construct tree-level scattering amplitudes for these degrees of freedom and use them to find the maximum scale of perturbative unitarity violation. The highest scale is Λ3 = (m2MP)1/3, which is saturated by ghost-free bigravity. The strong coupling scale can be further raised to MP if the kinetic term for one particle has the wrong sign, which uniquely gives the amplitudes of quadratic curvature gravity. We also discuss the generalization to massive higher-spin particles coupled to gravity.},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevD.98.085006},
journal = {Physical Review D},
number = 8,
volume = 98,
place = {United States},
year = {Mon Oct 08 00:00:00 EDT 2018},
month = {Mon Oct 08 00:00:00 EDT 2018}
}

Journal Article:
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.085006

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Cited by: 16 works
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