Is N=8 supergravity ultraviolet finite?
2006
171 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Conventional wisdom holds that no four-dimensional gravity field theory can be ultraviolet finite. This understanding is based mainly on power counting. Recent studies confirm that one-loop N = 8 supergravity amplitudes satisfy the so-called 'no-triangle hypothesis', which states that triangle and bubble integrals cancel from these amplitudes. A consequence of this hypothesis is that for any number of external legs, at one loop N = 8 supergravity and N = 4 super-Yang-Mills have identical superficial degrees of ultraviolet behavior in D dimensions. We describe how the unitarity method allows us to promote these one-loop cancellations to higher loops, suggesting that previous power counts were too conservative. We discuss higher-loop evidence suggesting that N = 8 supergravity has the same degree of divergence as N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory and is ultraviolet finite in four dimensions. We comment on calculations needed to reinforce this proposal, which are feasible using the unitarity method.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c786fc56e6496ed5d688a836e0606a7eec8b7731
Citations in the corpus
- Factorization properties of soft graviton amplitudes (2011, unknown): “A possible application of these ideas is, for example, that of settling the question of whether N = 8 supergravity is ultraviolet finite [8, 9, 10, 11, 12].”
- Generating tree amplitudes in Script N = 4 SYM and Script N = 8 SG (2008, unknown): “Additional references are given in [1, 2, 4].”
- Scattering on plane waves and the double copy (2017, unknown): “These computations have demonstrated the inadequacy of standard techniques for determining the onset of UV divergences in supergravity [10–12], and have even fueled speculations that four-dimensional N = 8 supergravity could be perturbatively ultraviolet finite [13, 14].”
- Analyticity and the holographic S-matrix (2011, unknown): “The remarkably simple properties of the scattering amplitudes themselves [43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 41, 42] and the existence of matrix models [49] might be viewed as evidence for this sort of conjecture.”