Generalized elastic positivity bounds on interacting massive spin-2 theories

Abstract

Abstract We use generalized elastic positivity bounds to constrain the parameter space of multi-field spin-2 effective field theories. These generalized bounds involve inelastic scattering amplitudes between particles with different masses, which contain kinematic singularities even in the t = 0 limit. We apply these bounds to the pseudo-linear spin-2 theory, the cycle spin-2 theory and the line spin-2 theory respectively. For the pseudo-linear theory, we exclude the remaining operators that are unconstrained by the usual elastic positivity bounds, thus excluding all the leading (or highest cutoff) interacting operators in the theory. For the cycle and line theory, our approach also provides new bounds on the Wilson coefficients previously unconstrained, bounding the parameter space in both theories to be a finite region (i.e., every Wilson coefficient being constrained from both sides). To help visualize these finite regions, we sample various cross sections of them and estimate the total volumes.