Speaker
Zohar Komargodsky
Description
We consider weakly-coupled theories of massive higher-spin particles. This class of models includes, for instance, tree-level String Theory and Large-N Yang-Mills theory. The S-matrix in such theories is a meromorphic function obeying unitarity and crossing symmetry. We discuss the unphysical high-energy fixed imaginary angle scattering regime. We expect the amplitude to be universal and exponentially large in this limit. We develop methods to study this regime and show that the amplitude necessarily coincides with the Veneziano amplitude there. Our analysis shows that any such theory of higher-spin particles has stringy excitations and infinitely many asymptotically parallel subleading trajectories. More generally, we argue that, under some assumptions, any theory with at least one higher-spin particle must have strings.
