Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Letter
  • Open Access

Bounds on crossing symmetry

Sebastian Mizera*

  • Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA

  • *smizera@ias.edu

Phys. Rev. D 103, L081701 – Published 12 April, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.L081701

Abstract

Proposed in 1954 by Gell-Mann, Goldberger, and Thirring, crossing symmetry postulates that particles are indistinguishable from antiparticles traveling back in time. Its elusive proof amounts to demonstrating that scattering matrices in different crossing channels are boundary values of the same analytic function, as a consequence of physical axioms such as causality, locality, or unitarity. In this work we report on the progress in proving crossing symmetry on shell within the framework of perturbative quantum field theory. We derive bounds on internal masses above which scattering amplitudes are crossing symmetric to all loop orders. They are valid for four- and five-point processes, or to all multiplicity if one allows deformations of momenta into higher dimensions at intermediate steps.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

Supplemental Material

References (52)

  1. M. Gell-Mann, M. Goldberger, and W. E. Thirring, Use of causality conditions in quantum theory, Phys. Rev. 95, 1612 (1954).
  2. M. Gell-Mann and M. Goldberger, Scattering of low-energy photons by particles of spin 1/2, Phys. Rev. 96, 1433 (1954).
  3. M. Gell-Mann, We never wrote up the crossing relations, Web of Stories.
  4. D. Atkinson, A proof of the existence of functions that satisfy exactly both crossing and unitarity: I. Neutral pion-pion scattering. No subtractions, Nucl. Phys. B7, 375 (1968); Erratum, B15, 331 (1970).
  5. A. Martin, Scattering Theory: Unitarity, Analyticity and Crossing (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1969), Vol. 3, 10.1007/BFb0101043.
  6. A. Adams, N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dubovsky, A. Nicolis, and R. Rattazzi, Causality, analyticity and an IR obstruction to UV completion, J. High Energy Phys. 10 (2006) 014.
  7. M. F. Paulos, J. Penedones, J. Toledo, B. C. van Rees, and P. Vieira, The S-matrix bootstrap. Part III: Higher dimensional amplitudes, J. High Energy Phys. 12 (2019) 040.
  8. A. L. Guerrieri, J. Penedones, and P. Vieira, Bootstrapping QCD Using Pion Scattering Amplitudes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 241604 (2019).
  9. B. Bellazzini, J. Elias Miró, R. Rattazzi, M. Riembau, and F. Riva, Positive moments for scattering amplitudes, arXiv:2011.00037.
  10. A. J. Tolley, Z.-Y. Wang, and S.-Y. Zhou, New positivity bounds from full crossing symmetry, arXiv:2011.02400.
  11. A. Guerrieri, J. Penedones, and P. Vieira, S-matrix bootstrap for effective field theories: Massless pions, arXiv:2011.02802.
  12. S. Caron-Huot and V. Van Duong, Extremal effective field theories, arXiv:2011.02957.
  13. P. Tourkine and A. Zhiboedov, Scattering from production in 2d, arXiv:2101.05211.
  14. J. Bros, H. Epstein, and V. J. Glaser, Some rigorous analyticity properties of the four-point function in momentum space, Nuovo Cimento 31, 1265 (1964).
  15. J. Bros, H. Epstein, and V. Glaser, A proof of the crossing property for two-particle amplitudes in general quantum field theory, Commun. Math. Phys. 1, 240 (1965).
  16. J. Bros, V. Glaser, and H. Epstein, Local analyticity properties of the n particle scattering amplitude, Helv. Phys. Acta 45, 149 (1972).
  17. J. Bros, Derivation of asymptotic crossing domains for multiparticle processes in axiomatic quantum field theory: A general approach and a complete proof for 2→3 particle processes, Phys. Rep. 134, 325 (1986).
  18. O. Steinmann, Über den Zusammenhang zwischen den Wightmanfunktionen und den retardierten Kommutatoren, Helv. Phys. Acta 33, 257 (1960).
  19. O. Steinmann, Wightman-Funktionen und retardierte Kommutatoren. II, Helv. Phys. Acta 33, 347 (1960).
  20. D. Ruelle, Connection between Wightman functions and Green functions in p-space, Nuovo Cimento 19, 356 (1961).
  21. H. Araki, Generalized retarded functions and analytic function in momentum space in quantum field theory, J. Math. Phys. (N.Y.) 2, 163 (1961).
  22. H. Araki and N. Burgoyne, Properties of the momentum space analytic function, Nuovo Cimento 18, 342 (1960).
  23. See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.L081701 for a review of previous results and examples.
  24. H. Epstein, Some analytic properties of scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory, in Proceedings of the 8th Brandeis University Summer Institute in Theoretical Physics: Particle Symmetries and Axiomatic Field Theory (Gordon and Breach, Science Publishers, Inc., New York, 1966), pp. 1–128.
  25. G. Sommer, Present state of rigorous analytic properties of scattering amplitudes, Fortschr. Phys. 18, 577 (1970).
  26. N. Bogolubov, A. Logunov, A. Oksak, and I. Todorov, General Principles of Quantum Field Theory, Mathematical Physics and Applied Mathematics (Springer, Netherlands, 1989).
  27. See also [28] for progress using the assumption of asymptotic completeness and [29, 30] for reviews of previous incomplete attempts at proving crossing symmetry.

  28. J. Bros, Analytic structure of Green’s functions in quantum field theory, in Mathematical Problems in Theoretical Physics, edited by K. Osterwalder (Springer, Berlin, 1980), pp. 166–199.
  29. R. J. Eden, P. V. Landshoff, D. I. Olive, and J. C. Polkinghorne, The Analytic S-Matrix (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1966), Sec. IV.8.
  30. D. Iagolnitzer, The S Matrix (North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1978), App. IV.
  31. T. T. Wu, Domains of definition for Feynman integrals over real Feynman parameters, Phys. Rev. 123, 678 (1961).
  32. L. F. Cook and J. Tarski, Some properties of the five-point function in perturbation theory, J. Math. Phys. (N.Y.) 3, 1 (1962).
  33. D. Branson, P. V. Landshoff, and J. C. Taylor, Derivation of partial amplitudes and the validity of dispersion relations for production processes, Phys. Rev. 132, 902 (1963).
  34. J. B. Boyling, Hermitian analyticity and extended unitarity in S-matrix theory, Nuovo Cimento 33, 1356 (1964).
  35. N. Nakanishi, Graph Theory and Feynman Integrals, Mathematics and its applications: A series of monographs and texts (Gordon and Breach, New York, 1971).
  36. The representation (7) makes it transparent why proving crossing symmetry off shell is trivial in perturbation theory: all the n(n−1)/2 kinematic invariants can be deformed independently in Impi·pj<0 for i≠j while preserving analyticity and causality (see also [37] for the loop momentum perspective). It is imposing on shellness, i.e., fixed pi2=Mi2, that introduces difficulties.

  37. C. De Lacroix, H. Erbin, and A. Sen, Analyticity and crossing symmetry of superstring loop amplitudes, J. High Energy Phys. 05 (2019) 139.
  38. L. Landau, On analytic properties of vertex parts in quantum field theory, Nucl. Phys. 13, 181 (1960).
  39. N. Nakanishi, Ordinary and anomalous thresholds in perturbation theory, Prog. Theor. Phys. 22, 128 (1959).
  40. J. D. Bjorken, Experimental tests of quantum electrodynamics and spectral representations of Green’s functions in perturbation theory, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1959.
  41. In going from (5) to (6) we broke projective invariance, which obscures potential singularities at infinities [42]. They need not concern us because we will not deform the integration contour.

  42. D. B. Fairlie, P. V. Landshoff, J. Nuttall, and J. C. Polkinghorne, Singularities of the second type, J. Math. Phys. (N.Y.) 3, 594 (1962).
  43. P. Chin and E. Tomboulis, Nonlocal vertices and analyticity: Landau equations and general Cutkosky rule, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2018) 014.
  44. I. Prlina, M. Spradlin, and S. Stanojevic, All-Loop Singularities of Scattering Amplitudes in Massless Planar Theories, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 081601 (2018).
  45. J. Collins, A new and complete proof of the Landau condition for pinch singularities of Feynman graphs and other integrals, arXiv:2007.04085.
  46. S. Komatsu, M. F. Paulos, B. C. Van Rees, and X. Zhao, Landau diagrams in AdS and S-matrices from conformal correlators, J. High Energy Phys. 11 (2020) 046.
  47. M. Mühlbauer, Momentum space Landau equations via isotopy techniques, arXiv:2011.10368.
  48. N. Nakanishi, Parametric integral formulas and analytic properties in perturbation theory, Prog. Theor. Phys. Suppl. 18, 1 (1961).
  49. J. Boyling, Majorization of Feynman diagrams in which a heavy particle is conserved, Ann. Phys. (N.Y.) 25, 249 (1963).
  50. J. Boyling, Majorization of Feynman diagrams involving pions and nucleons, Ann. Phys. (N.Y.) 28, 435 (1964).
  51. R. Britto, F. Cachazo, B. Feng, and E. Witten, Direct Proof of Tree-Level Recursion Relation in Yang-Mills Theory, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 181602 (2005).
  52. D. Iagolnitzer, Factorization of the multiparticle S matrix in two-dimensional space-time models, Phys. Rev. D 18, 1275 (1978).

Outline

Information

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation