English

Inflation Correlators with Multiple Massive Exchanges

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-03-13 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The most general tree-level boundary correlation functions of quantum fields in inflationary spacetime involve multiple exchanges of massive states in the bulk, which are technically difficult to compute due to the multi-layer nested time integrals in the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. On the other hand, correlators with multiple massive exchanges are well motivated in cosmological collider physics, with the original quasi-single-field inflation model as a notable example. In this work, with the partial Mellin-Barnes representation, we derive a simple rule, called family-tree decomposition, for directly writing down analytical answers for arbitrary nested time integrals in terms of multi-variable hypergeometric series. We present the derivation of this rule together with many explicit examples. This result allows us to obtain analytical expressions for general tree-level inflation correlators with multiple massive exchanges. As an example, we present the full analytical results for a range of tree correlators with two massive exchanges.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.10849,
  title  = {Inflation Correlators with Multiple Massive Exchanges},
  author = {Zhong-Zhi Xianyu and Jiaju Zang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.10849},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

56 pages, JHEP accepted version with new discussions and figures on phenomenology