Gravitational positivity for phenomenologists: Dark gauge boson in the swampland

Abstract

The gravitational positivity bound gives quantitative “swampland” constraints on low-energy effective theories inside theories of quantum gravity. We give a comprehensive discussion of this bound for those interested in applications to phenomenological model building. We present a practical recipe for deriving the bound, and discuss subtleties relevant for realistic models. As an illustration, we study the positivity bound on the scattering of the massive gauge bosons in the Higgs/Stückelberg mechanism. Under certain assumptions on gravitational amplitudes at high energy, we obtain a lower bound mV≳ΛUV2/gMPl on the gauge boson mass mV, where g is the coupling constant of the gauge field, MPl is the reduced Planck mass and ΛUV is the ultraviolet cutoff of the effective field theory. This bound can strongly constrain new physics models involving a massive gauge boson. We also discuss how the bound depends on our high-energy assumptions. Published by the American Physical Society 2024