Spurious poles in the scattering of electric and magnetic charges

• Main Authors: John Terning, Christopher B. Verhaaren
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2020-12-01
• Series: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Subjects: Duality in Gauge Field Theories; Scattering Amplitudes
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2020)153

Abstract Theories with both electric and magnetic charges (“mutually non-local” theories) have several major obstacles to calculating scattering amplitudes. Even when the interaction arises through the kinetic mixing of two, otherwise independent, U(1)’s, so that all low-energy interactions are perturbative, difficulties remain: using a self-dual, local formalism leads to spurious poles at any finite order in perturbation theory. Correct calculations must show how the spurious poles cancel in observable scattering amplitudes. Consistency requires that one type of charge is confined as a result of one of the U(1)’s being broken. Here we show how the constraints of confinement and parity conservation on observable processes manages to cancel the spurious poles in scattering and pair production amplitudes, paving the way for systematic studies of the experimental signatures of “dark” electric-magnetic processes. Along the way we demonstrate some novel effects in electric-magnetic interactions, including that the amplitude for single photon production of magnetic particles by electric particles vanishes.