2023/12/14 by Marco Piva, Piva, Marco
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.09045
openalex publication_date 2023/12/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study a class of renormalizable quantum field theories with purely virtual particles that exhibits nonrenormalizable behavior in the high-energy limit of scattering cross sections, which grow as powers of the center-of-mass energy squared and seems to violate unitarity bounds. We point out that the problem should be viewed as a violation of perturbativity, instead of unitarity, and show that the resummation of self energies fixes the issue. As an explicit example, we consider a class of O(N) theories at the leading order in the large-N expansion and show that the different quantization prescription of purely virtual particles takes care of the nonrenormalizable behavior, making the resummed cross sections to decrease at high energies and the amplitudes to satisfy the unitarity bounds. We compare the results to the case of theories with ghosts, where the resummation cannot change the behavior of cross sections due to certain cancellations in the high-energy expansion of the self energies. These results are particularly relevant for quantum gravity.