On amplitudes, resonances and the ultraviolet completion of gravity

Abstract

This letter constructs, making use of the on-shell spinor-helicity formalism, a possible ultraviolet completion of gravity following a "bottom-up" approach. The assumptions of locality, unitarity and causality i) require an infinite tower of resonances with increasing spin and quantized mass, ii) introduce a duality relation among crossed scattering channels, and iii) dress all gravitational amplitudes in the Standard Model with a form factor that closely resembles either the Veneziano or the Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude in string theory. As a consequence of unitarity, the theory predicts leading order deviations from General Relativity in the coupling of gravity to fermions that could be explained if space-time has torsion in addition to curvature.

22 pages (two-column layout), 3 figures