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Causality constraints on corrections to Einstein gravity

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arxiv 2201.06602 v1 pith:FSNMZHEP submitted 2022-01-17 hep-th gr-qchep-ph

Causality constraints on corrections to Einstein gravity

classification hep-th gr-qchep-ph
keywords causalityboundsconstraintsdispersioneinsteingravitationalgravityimply
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We study constraints from causality and unitarity on $2\to2$ graviton scattering in four-dimensional weakly-coupled effective field theories. Together, causality and unitarity imply dispersion relations that connect low-energy observables to high-energy data. Using such dispersion relations, we derive two-sided bounds on gravitational Wilson coefficients in terms of the mass $M$ of new higher-spin states. Our bounds imply that gravitational interactions must shut off uniformly in the limit $G \to 0$, and prove the scaling with $M$ expected from dimensional analysis (up to an infrared logarithm). We speculate that causality, together with the non-observation of gravitationally-coupled higher spin states at colliders, severely restricts modifications to Einstein gravity that could be probed by experiments in the near future.

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