English

On Cosmological Correlators at One Loop

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-01-06 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We study equal-time in-in correlators of massless scalar fields in flat space at one loop. Using the time-ordered decomposition of correlators together with a cosmological analogue of the Baikov representation, we systematically construct relatively simple loop integrals and make manifest why, in this setting, loop corrections to correlators are simpler than those of wavefunction coefficients. As benchmark examples, we analyse the bubble and triangle diagrams. The bubble exhibits a UV divergence that can be removed by a local counterterm, while the triangle yields a finite result, which we evaluate explicitly in terms of dilogarithms using an integral transform for the Laplacian Green's function. We classify the kinematic singularities of these diagrams using Landau analysis, identifying novel types of singular behaviour, and validate this analysis against the explicit results. Finally, we derive a factorisation property of one-loop cosmological correlators at singular kinematics, relating them to flat-space loop amplitudes and lower-point tree-level correlators.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.00952,
  title  = {On Cosmological Correlators at One Loop},
  author = {Guilherme L. Pimentel and Tom Westerdijk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.00952},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

77 pages, 32 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:48:58.374Z