Self-healing unitarity is an optical illusion

Abstract

Among the vast variety of proposals put forward by the community to resolve tree-level unitarity violations in Higgs inflation models, there exists the concept of self-healing. It heals the theory from supposed tree-level violations for elastic scattering processes by summing over successive vacuum polarization loop corrections. In this work, we examine this technique to check whether unitarity is indeed restored and find that there exist underlying constraints in self-healing unitarity that pose the same perturbative unitarity bounds that it was expected to heal.