Massive spin-2 scattering amplitudes in extra-dimensional theories

Abstract

In this paper we describe in detail the computation of the scattering amplitudes of massive spin-2 Kaluza-Klein excitations in a gravitational theory with a single compact extra dimension, whether flat or warped. These scattering amplitudes are characterized by intricate cancellations between different contributions: Although individual contributions may grow as fast as O(s5), the full results grow only as O(s). We demonstrate that the cancellations persist for all incoming and outgoing particle helicities and examine how truncating the computation to only include a finite number of intermediate states impacts the accuracy of the results. We also carefully assess the range of validity of the low-energy effective Kaluza-Klein theory. In particular, for the warped case we demonstrate directly how an emergent low-energy scale controls the size of the scattering amplitude, as conjectured by the AdS/CFT correspondence.