Flux Tube $S$-Matrix Bootstrap

We bootstrap the $S$ matrix of massless particles in unitary, relativistic two dimensional quantum field theories. We find that the low energy expansion of such $S$ matrices is strongly constrained by the existence of a UV completion. In the context of flux tube (FT) physics, this allows us to constrain several terms in the $S$ matrix low energy expansion or—equivalently—on Wilson coefficients of several irrelevant operators showing up in the FT effective action. These bounds have direct implications for other physical quantities; for instance, they allow us to further bound the ground state energy as well as the level splitting of degenerate energy levels of large FTs. We find that the $S$ matrices living at the boundary of the allowed space exhibit an intricate pattern of resonances with one sharper resonance whose quantum numbers, mass, and width are precisely those of the world-sheet axion proposed by Athenodorou, Bringoltz, and Teper and Dubovsky, Flauger, and Gorbenko. The general method proposed here should be extendable to massless $S$ matrices in higher dimensions and should lead to new quantitative bounds on irrelevant operators in theories of Goldstones and, also, in gauge and gravity theories.

Figure 1

Allowed $\{{\tilde{\gamma }}_3,{\tilde{\gamma }}_5,{\tilde{\gamma }}_7\}$ space for a $D=3$ FT $S$ matrix.

Figure 2

Allowed region in the $\{{\beta }_3,{\alpha }_3\}$ parameter space of FT $S$ matrices in $D=4$ as obtained by numerics.

Figure 3

As we move along the boundary, we encounter $S$ matrices whose resonance mass and width are in precise agreement with those predicted in [9, 32] as extracted from $SU(3)$ (right point) and $SU(5)$ (left point) lattice data.