There is a longstanding argument that local field theory with gravity must break down at the species scale, which is much lower than the Planck scale by the large number of species. We aim to improve the understanding of this statement. We analyze the one-loop effects of massive fields on the graviton scattering and use the analyticity and unitarity to provide numerical species bounds for light species. Around the scale where the field theory breaks down, we instead analyze the partial waves and observe that possible UV scenarios with gravity, such as string theory, all exhibit significant high-spin contents. This motivates a concept "high-spin onset scale", which qualitatively coincides with string scale or higher dimensional Plank scale, depending on the UV scenarios. The suggestion is that the high-spin onset scale is a universal cutoff for field theory, beyond which the local field description should not exist.

报告人简介

厉岳洲(Yue-Zhou Li)，于天津大学获得硕士学位，麦吉尔大学获得博士学生，目前于普林斯顿大学做博士后研究工作。研究兴趣与方向集中于conformal field theory, S-matrix and amplitudes, holography, dS and cosmology

邀请人

吴洁强 副研究员