Journal of High Energy Physics (Feb 2025)

On unitarity of the hypergeometric amplitude

  • Gareth Mansfield,
  • Marcus Spradlin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep02(2025)145
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2025, no. 2
pp. 1 – 35

Abstract

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Abstract The hypergeometric amplitude is a one-parameter deformation of the Veneziano amplitude for four-point tachyon scattering in bosonic string theory that is consistent with S-matrix bootstrap constraints. In this article we construct a similar hypergeometric generalization of the Veneziano amplitude for type-I superstring theory. We then rule out a large region of the (r, m 2 , D) parameter space as non-unitary, and establish another large subset of the (r, m 2 , D) parameter space where all of the residue’s partial wave coefficients are positive. We also analyze positivity in various limits and special cases. As a corollary to our analysis, we are able to directly demonstrate positivity of a wider set of Veneziano amplitude partial wave coefficients than what has been presented elsewhere.

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