Speaker
Description
We develop a primal bootstrap framework for gravitational effective field theo-
ries based on fully crossing-symmetric dispersion relations, using finite-resolution sampling
instead of smearing. This approach has several key advantages: it allows direct control
over the number of subtractions, makes it possible to impose linearized unitarity beyond
positivity, and gives direct access to extremal spectra. We uncover new non-projective
bounds that fix the overall scale of EFT couplings, including upper bounds of the form
M
MPlanck ≲ 7.8 in D = 5, implying that the EFT cutoff M cannot be arbitrarily larger than
the Planck scale. At extremal points saturating these bounds, we find stable spectra with
sharp and unexpected quadratic trajectories.
