Structure of Kaluza-Klein graviton scattering amplitudes from the gravitational equivalence theorem and double copy

Abstract

We study the structure of scattering amplitudes of the Kaluza-Klein (KK) gravitons and of the gravitational KK Goldstone bosons in the compactified 5d General Relativity (GR). We analyze the geometric "Higgs" mechanism for mass-generation of KK gravitons under compactification with a general $R_\xi$ gauge-fixing, which is free from the vDVZ discontinuity. Then, we formulate the Gravitational Equivalence Theorem (GRET) to connect the longitudinal KK graviton amplitudes to the KK Goldstone amplitudes, which is a manifestation of the geometric Higgs mechanism at $S$-matrix level. We directly compute the tree-level KK Goldstone amplitudes which equal the longitudinal KK graviton amplitudes in the high energy limit. We further extend the double-copy method with color-kinematics duality to reconstruct the massive KK longitudinal graviton (Goldstone) amplitudes from the KK longitudinal gauge boson (Goldstone) amplitudes in the compactified 5d Yang-Mills (YM) theory under high energy expansion. From these, we reconstruct the GRET of the KK longitudinal graviton (Goldstone) amplitudes in the 5d GR from the KK longitudinal gauge boson (Goldstone) amplitudes in the 5d YM theory. Using either the GRET or the double-copy reconstruction, we provide a theoretical mechanism showing that the sum of all the energy-power terms [up to $O(E^{10})$] in the high-energy four longitudinal KK graviton amplitudes must cancel down to $O(E^2)$ as enforced by matching the energy-power dependence of the corresponding KK Goldstone amplitudes or by matching that of the double-copy amplitudes from the KK YM theory. With the double-copy approach, we establish a new correspondence between the two energy-cancellations: $E^4 \to E^0$ in the 5d KK YM theory and $E^{10} \to E^2$ in the 5d KK GR theory. We further analyze the structure of the residual terms in the GRET and uncover a new energy-cancellation mechanism therein.