Massless-Massive Amplitude Correspondence III: Massive Amplitude Bases in the SMEFT

Abstract

We develop a systematic correspondence between massless contact amplitudes in an unbroken theory and massive contact amplitudes after spontaneous symmetry breaking. Our construction employs the spin-transversality (ST) massive amplitude basis, with the systematic high energy expansion through minimal-helicity-chirality (MHC) amplitudes. The resulting $U(2)=SU(2)\times U(1)_t$ description of a massive particle makes the semi-standard Young-tableau construction of massless Lorentz structures directly applicable to massive amplitudes. When the leading-order MHC component has a massless contact limit, it is one-to-one matched directly to its UV amplitude. Otherwise, five exceptional classes of ST amplitudes are identified, their first non-zero descendant components are matched through conserved current couplings to the massless contact amplitude. We apply the framework to the one-flavor electroweak sector of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) through dimension eight, obtaining explicit relations between unbroken-phase Wilson coefficients and broken-phase ST amplitude coefficients for amplitudes with three to eight external particles.