Gravitational positivity for phenomenologists: Dark gauge boson in the swampland

The gravitational positivity bound gives quantitative “swampland” constraints on low-energy effective theories inside theories of quantum gravity. We give a comprehensive discussion of this bound for those interested in applications to phenomenological model building. We present a practical recipe for deriving the bound, and discuss subtleties relevant for realistic models. As an illustration, we study the positivity bound on the scattering of the massive gauge bosons in the Higgs/Stückelberg mechanism. Under certain assumptions on gravitational amplitudes at high energy, we obtain a lower bound <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:msub><a:mi>m</a:mi><a:mi>V</a:mi></a:msub><a:mo>≳</a:mo><a:msubsup><a:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</a:mi><a:mi>UV</a:mi><a:mn>2</a:mn></a:msubsup><a:mo>/</a:mo><a:mi>g</a:mi><a:msub><a:mi>M</a:mi><a:mi>Pl</a:mi></a:msub></a:math> on the gauge boson mass <d:math xmlns:d="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><d:msub><d:mi>m</d:mi><d:mi>V</d:mi></d:msub></d:math>, where <f:math xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><f:mi>g</f:mi></f:math> is the coupling constant of the gauge field, <h:math xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><h:msub><h:mi>M</h:mi><h:mi>Pl</h:mi></h:msub></h:math> is the reduced Planck mass and <j:math xmlns:j="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><j:msub><j:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</j:mi><j:mi>UV</j:mi></j:msub></j:math> is the ultraviolet cutoff of the effective field theory. This bound can strongly constrain new physics models involving a massive gauge boson. We also discuss how the bound depends on our high-energy assumptions.