Quantization and high energy unitarity of 5D orbifold theories with brane kinetic terms

Abstract

Five-dimensional field theories compactified on an ${S}^{1}/{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ orbifold naturally include local brane kinetic terms at the orbifold fixed points at the tree as well as the quantum level. We study the quantization of these theories before the Kaluza-Klein reduction and derive the relevant Ward and Slavnov-Taylor identities that result from the underlying gauge and Becchi-Rouet-Stora symmetries of the theory. With the help of these identities, we obtain a generalization of the equivalence theorem, where the known high-energy equivalence relation between the longitudinal Kaluza-Klein gauge modes and their respective would-be Goldstone bosons is extended to consistently include the energetically suppressed terms in the high-energy scatterings. Demanding perturbative unitarity, we compute upper limits on the number of the Kaluza-Klein modes. We find that these limits weakly depend on the size of the brane kinetic terms.