Positivity bounds are powerful tools to constrain effective field theories. Utilizing the partial wave expansion in the dispersion relation and the full crossing symmetry of the scattering amplitude, we derive several sets of generically nonlinear positivity bounds for a generic scalar effective field theory: we refer to these as the P Q, Dsu, Dstu and $$ {\overline{D}}^{\mathrm{stu}} $$ D ¯ stu bounds. While the PQ bounds and Dsu bounds only make use of the s↔u dispersion relation, the Dstu and $$ {\overline{D}}^{\mathrm{stu}} $$ D ¯ stu bounds are obtained by further imposing the s↔t crossing symmetry. In contradistinction to the linear positivity for scalars, these inequalities can be applied to put upper and lower bounds on Wilson coefficients, and are much more constraining as shown in the lowest orders. In particular we are able to exclude theories with soft amplitude behaviour such as weakly broken Galileon theories from admitting a standard UV completion. We also apply these bounds to chiral perturbation theory and we find these bounds are stronger than the previous bounds in constraining its Wilson coefficients.

We use generalized elastic positivity bounds to constrain the parameter space of multi-field spin-2 effective field theories. These generalized bounds involve inelastic scattering amplitudes between particles with different masses, which contain kinematic singularities even in the t = 0 limit. We apply these bounds to the pseudo-linear spin-2 theory, the cycle spin-2 theory and the line spin-2 theory respectively. For the pseudo-linear theory, we exclude the remaining operators that are unconstrained by the usual elastic positivity bounds, thus excluding all the leading (or highest cutoff) interacting operators in the theory. For the cycle and line theory, our approach also provides new bounds on the Wilson coefficients previously unconstrained, bounding the parameter space in both theories to be a finite region (i.e., every Wilson coefficient being constrained from both sides). To help visualize these finite regions, we sample various cross sections of them and estimate the total volumes.

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