A Simple-Minded Unitarity Constraint and an Application to Unparticles

Abstract

Unitarity, a powerful constraint on new physics, has not always been properly accounted for in the context of hidden sectors. Feng, Rajaraman and Tu have suggested that large (pb to nb) multi-photon or multi-lepton sugnals could be generated at the LHC through the three-point functions of a conformally-invariant hidden sector (an "unparticle" sector.) Because of the conformal invariance, the kinematic distributions are calculable. However, the cross-sections for many such processes grow rapidly with energy, and at some high scale, to preserve unitarity, conformal invariance must break down. Requiring that conformal invariance not be broken, and that no signals be already observed at the Tevatron, we obtain a strong unitarity bound on multi-photon events at the (10 TeV) LHC. For the model of Feng et al., even with extremely conservative assumptions, cross-sections must be below 25 fb, and for operator dimension near 2, well below 1 fb. In more general models, four-photon signals could still reach cross-sections of a few pb, though bounds below 200 fb are more typical. Our methods apply to a wide variety of other processes and settings.