Kevin Zhou (Stanford) “Electromagnetism and Gravity with Continuous Spin”

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Abstract: Powerful general arguments allow only a few families of long-range interactions, exemplified by gauge field theories of electromagnetism and gravity. However, all of these arguments presuppose that massless fields have zero spin scale and hence exactly boost invariant helicity. I will present a Lagrangian formalism describing interactions of matter particles with bosonic “continuous spin” fields with arbitrary spin scale. Remarkably, physical observables such as forces and radiation emission are well approximated by familiar theories in the ultraviolet, with calculable, universal, and observable deviations at low frequencies and long distances. These infrared modifications to familiar forces, long thought impossible, may shed light on a variety of problems in fundamental physics.