arXiv subjects

Nicolas H. Pavao

Publications and source records attributed to Nicolas H. Pavao.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Nonperturbative double copy: worldline instantons, color thermality, and backreaction

We present a first-principles, non-perturbative worldline instanton analysis of vacuum decay in the non-abelian Yang-Mills root of a Schwarzschild background. We recover the gauge theory color-thermal spectrum as a topological winding mode. The double copy maps vacuum response from the gauge theory directly to the gravity theory. Furthermore, the decay exponent acquires a universal quadratic correction from color charge conservation, showing that the double copy correctly captures the non-linear backreaction as required for unitarity.

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arXiv2023

UV Massive Resonance from IR Double Copy Consistency

From the perspective of effective field theory (EFT), Wilson coefficients of the low energy theory are determined by integrating out modes of the full ultraviolet (UV) theory. The spectrum can be in principle resummed if one has access to all available infrared (IR) coefficients at low energies. In this work we show that there exists a general class of consistent massive resonance double-copy (CMRDC) models where UV massive residues are reconstructed through double-copy consistency conditions between the IR Wilson coefficients of the full EFT expansion. Through a color-dual bootstrap, we find surprisingly that double-copy consistency alone introduces the kinematic factors of CMRDC models that soften high energy behavior by exponentiating color-dual contacts. This bootstrap suggests that our massive resonance paradigm is an inevitable consequence of the duality between color and kinematics, thereby providing a path towards emergent UV structure directly from the IR. We then demonstrate how CMRDC models can capture a spectrum of massive modes compatible with general multiplicity, and use Padé extrapolation to solve the inverse problem of identifying massive UV resonance from a small number of IR Wilson coefficients.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2023

Double-copy towards supergravity inflation with $α$-attractor models

Key to the simplicity of supergravity $α$-attractor models of inflation are Volkov-Akulov fermions, often in the form of nilpotent superfields. Here we explore the possibility of using the double-copy to construct theories of Dirac-Born-Infeld-Volkov-Akulov (DBIVA) coupled to supergravity. A color-dual bootstrap admits scattering amplitudes involving pions and vectors through five-point tree-level order by order in mass-dimension, but requires the introduction of a $\text{Tr}(F^3)$ operator. Gauge theories with this operator were recently found to require a tower of higher-derivative operators to be compatible with color-kinematics duality. Adjoint-type double-copy construction at its most conservative seems to require the UV completion of DBIVA + pure Poincaré supergravity scattering amplitudes to a family of theories involving DBIVA-like particles coupled to Weyl-Einstein supergravity. We also point out an alternative solution to color-dual gauged pions that allows adjoint double-copy without a tower of higher derivative corrections but at the cost of exchange symmetry between scalars.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Virtues of a symmetric-structure double copy

We demonstrate a physical motivation for extending color-dual or BCJ double-copy construction to include theories with kinematic numerators that obey the same algebraic relations as symmetric structure constants, $d^{abc}=\text{Tr}[\{T^{a},T^{b}\}T^c]$. We verify that $U(N_c)$ nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) pions, long known to be color-dual in terms of antisymmetric adjoint factors, $f^{abc}$, are also color-dual in the sense of symmetric color structures, $d^{abc}$, explicitly through six-point scattering. This reframing of NLSM pion amplitudes complements our compositional construction of $d^{abc}$ color-dual higher derivative gauge operators. With adjoint and symmetric color-dual kinematics, we can span all four-point effective photon operators via a double-copy construction using amplitudes from physical theories. We further comment on a tension between locality and adjoint effective numerators, and the implications for spanning gravitational effective operators with non-adjoint kinematics.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

The Color-Dual Fates of $F^3$, $R^3$, and $\mathcal{N}=4$ Supergravity

We find that the duality between color and kinematics can be used to inform the high energy behavior of effective field theories. Namely, we demonstrate that the massless gauge theory of Yang-Mills deformed by a higher-derivative $F^3$ operator cannot be tree-level color-dual while consistently factorizing without a tower of additional four-point counterterms with rigidly fixed Wilson coefficients that reaches to the ultraviolet (UV). We find through explicit calculation a suggestive resummation, namely that their amplitudes are consistent with the $α'$ expansion of those generated by the $(DF)^2+\text{YM}$ theory, a known color-dual theory where the $F^2$ term has been given a mass squared proportional to $1 / α'$. As a result, considering consistent double-copy construction as a physical principle implies that an $F^3$-based color-dual resolution of the UV divergence in $\mathcal{N}=4$ supergravity comes at the cost of field-theoretic locality. Similarly, when double-copying $F^3$ with itself, double-copy consistency lifts $R^3$ gravity to a family of gravity theories with an all-order tower of higher-derivative corrections, which includes the closed bosonic string as a standard adjoint-type double-copy.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Revealing the Landscape of Globally Color-Dual Multi-loop Integrands

We report on progress in understanding how to construct color-dual multi-loop amplitudes. First we identify a cubic theory, semi-abelian Yang-Mills, that unifies many of the color-dual theories studied in the literature, and provides a prescriptive approach for constructing $D$-dimensional color-dual numerators through one-loop directly from Feynman rules. By a simple weight counting argument, this approach does not further generalize to two-loops. As a first step in understanding the two-loop challenge, we use a $D$-dimensional color-dual bootstrap to successfully construct globally color-dual local two-loop four-point nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) numerators. The double-copy of these NLSM numerators with themselves, pure Yang-Mills, and $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills correctly reproduce the known unitarity constructed integrands of special Galileons, Born-Infeld theory, and Dirac-Born-Infeld-Volkov-Akulov theory, respectively. Applying our bootstrap to two-loop four-point pure Yang-Mills, we exhaustively search the space of local numerators and find that it fails to satisfy global color-kinematics duality, completing a search previously initiated in the literature. We pinpoint the failure to the bowtie unitarity cut, and discuss a path forward towards non-local construction of color-dual integrands at generic loop order.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Even-point Multi-loop Unitarity and its Applications: Exponentiation, Anomalies and Evanescence

We identify novel structure in newly computed multi-loop amplitudes and quantum actions for even-point effective field theories, including both the nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) and double-copy gauge theories such as Born-Infeld and its supersymmetric generalizations. We exploit special properties of all even-point theories towards efficient unitarity based amplitude construction. In doing so, we find evidence that the leading IR divergence of NLSM amplitudes exponentiates when the symmetry group is $\mathbb{CP}^1\cong SU(2)/U(1)$. We then systematically compute the two-loop anomalous behavior of Born-Infeld, and find that the counterterms needed to restore $U(1)$ invariant behavior at loop-level can be constructed via a symmetric-structure double-copy. We also demonstrate that the divergent part of the one-minus $(-+++)$ two-loop anomaly vanishes upon introducing an evanescent operator. In addition to these pure photon counterterms, we verify through explicit calculation that the anomalous matrix elements that violate $U(1)$ duality invariance can be alternatively cancelled by summing over internal $\mathcal{N}=4$ DBIVA superfields. Finally we find that $\mathcal{N}=4$ Dirac-Born-Infeld-Volkov-Akulov (DBIVA) amplitudes permit double-copy construction through two-loop order by reproducing our unitarity based result with a double copy between color-dual $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills and our two-loop NLSM amplitudes. This result supports the possibility of color-dual representations for NLSM beyond one-loop. We conclude with an overview of how $D$-dimensional four-photon counterterms can be constructed in generality with the symmetric-structure double-copy, and outline a convenient way of counting evanescent operators using Hilbert series as generating functions.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Effective observables for electromagnetic duality from novel amplitude decomposition

We introduce a decomposition of D-dimensional vector amplitudes in terms of building blocks that preserve all partial amplitude relations of the parent gauge-theory. Using this decomposition, we derive a new set of amplitude relations between nonlinear sigma model pions and the pure-scalar sector of Yang-Mills-scalar theory. These new relations indicate an equivalence between Born-Infeld duality invariance and that of Einstein-Maxwell theory, considering their known double-copy construction from the two scalar theories with Yang Mills. This observation motivates a general framework for constructing duality-invariant effective field theory observables at any multiplicity using the building blocks in our amplitude decomposition. Finally, we conjecture a subtle relationship between these duality-invariant building blocks and the bosonic sector of N=4 super Yang-Mills.

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