A Consistent Effective Theory of Long-Wavelength Cosmological Perturbations
Abstract
Effective field theory provides a perturbative framework to study the evolution of cosmological large-scale structure. We investigate the underpinnings of this approach, and suggest new ways to compute correlation functions of cosmological observables. We find that, in contrast with quantum field theory, the appropriate effective theory of classical cosmological perturbations involves interactions that are nonlocal in time. We describe an alternative to the usual approach of smoothing the perturbations, based on a path-integral formulation of the renormalization group equations. This technique allows for improved handling of short-distance modes that are perturbatively generated by long-distance interactions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1310.2920,
title = {A Consistent Effective Theory of Long-Wavelength Cosmological Perturbations},
author = {Sean M. Carroll and Stefan Leichenauer and Jason Pollack},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1310.2920},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
submitted to Phys. Rev. D; corrected typo