General properties of the decay amplitudes for massless particles

Abstract

We derive the kinematical constraints which characterize the decay of any massless particle in flat spacetime. We show that in perturbation theory the decay probabilities of photons and Yang-Mills bosons vanish to all orders; the decay probability of the graviton vanishes to one-loop order for graviton loops and to all orders for matter loops. A general power counting argument indicates in which conditions a decay of a massless particle could be possible: the lagrangian should contain a self-coupling without derivatives and with a coupling constant of positive mass dimension.

Latex file, 32 pages, to appear in Nucl. Phys. B. Improved presentation, some additional results and references, typos corrected