Geometry and Unitarity of Scalar Fields Coupled to Gravity

We formulate scalar field theories coupled nonconformally to gravity in a manifestly frame-independent fashion. Physical quantities such as the S matrix should be invariant under field redefinitions, and hence can be represented by the geometry of the target space. This elegant geometric formulation, however, is obscured when considering the coupling to gravity because of the redundancy associated with the Weyl transformation. The well-known example is the Higgs inflation, where the target space of the Higgs fields is flat in the Jordan frame but is curved in the Einstein frame. Furthermore, one can even show that any geometry of O(N) nonlinear σ models can be flattened by an appropriate Weyl transformation. In this Letter, we extend the notion of the target space by including the conformal mode of the metric, and show that the extended geometry provides a compact formulation that is manifestly Weyl-transformation or field-redefinition invariant. We identify the cutoff scale with the inverse of square root of the extended target-space curvature and confirm that it coincides with that obtained from two-to-two scattering amplitudes based on our formalism. Published by the American Physical Society 2024