Massive scattering amplitudes in six dimensions

Abstract

We show that a natural spinor-helicity formalism that can describe massive scattering amplitudes exists in D = 6 dimensions. This is arranged by having helicity spinors carry an index in the Dirac spinor 4 of the massive little group, SO(5) ∼ Sp(4). In the high energy limit, two separate kinds of massless helicity spinors emerge as required for consistency with arXiv:0902.0981, with indices in the two SU(2)’s of the massless little group SO(4). The tensors of 4 lead to particles with arbitrary spin, and using these and demanding consistent factorization, we can fix 3− and 4-point tree amplitudes of arbitrary masses and spins: we provide examples. We discuss the high energy limit of scattering amplitudes and the Higgs mechanism in this language, and make some preliminary observations about massive BCFW recursion.