Event Details

Scattering amplitudes of massive spinning particles generically grow with energy, leading to a violation of perturbative unitarity. The Higgs mechanism is a weaklycoupled solution to this problem for spin-1 particles, which is also realized in nature. In this talk I will discuss some of the new difficulties and solutions that arise when trying to unitarize amplitudes of massive spin-2 particles. While there is no gravitational version of the Higgs mechanism involving only low-spin particles, one way to soften the high-energy behaviour of massive spin-2 amplitudes is through the infinite towers of particles present in KaluzaKlein theories. I will discus in detail this mechanism of unitarization from geometry and how this leads to some interesting constraints on the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the scalar Laplacian on closed Ricci-flat manifolds.

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