Related papers: The Cosmological Optical Theorem
Primordial perturbations in our universe are believed to have a quantum origin, and can be described by the wavefunction of the universe (or equivalently, cosmological correlators). It follows that these observables must carry the imprint…
Our understanding of quantum correlators in cosmological spacetimes, including those that we can observe in cosmological surveys, has improved qualitatively in the past few years. Now we know many constraints that these objects must satisfy…
Unitarity of time evolution is one of the basic principles constraining physical processes. Its consequences in the perturbative Bunch-Davies wavefunction in cosmology have been formulated in terms of the cosmological optical theorem. In…
We derive discontinuity relations, also known as cutting rules, and explore the analytic properties of cosmological correlators, fundamental observables of the primordial universe. Our emphasis is on how these relations arise from unitarity…
Recent theoretical work has revealed that basic observables of quantum field theory in de Sitter space, known as in-in or cosmological correlators, exhibit surprisingly simple mathematical structure reminiscent of scattering amplitudes in…
The initial conditions of our universe appear to us in the form of a classical probability distribution that we probe with cosmological observations. In the current leading paradigm, this probability distribution arises from a quantum…
Much of the structure of cosmological correlators is controlled by their singularities, which in turn are fixed in terms of flat-space scattering amplitudes. An important challenge is to interpolate between the singular limits to determine…
We introduce and study an extension of the correlator of unparticle matter operators in a cosmological environment. Starting from FRW spaces we specialize to a de Sitter spacetime and derive its inflationary power spectrum which we find to…
Developing our understanding of how correlations evolve during inflation is crucial if we are to extract information about the early Universe from our late-time observables. To that end, we revisit the time evolution of scalar field…
We study the fundamentals of quantum field theory on a rigid de Sitter space. We show that the perturbative expansion of late-time correlation functions to all orders can be equivalently generated by a non-unitary Lagrangian on a Euclidean…
Scattering amplitudes at weak coupling are highly constrained by Lorentz invariance, locality and unitarity, and depend on model details only through coupling constants and particle content. In this paper, we develop an understanding of…
A number of diagrammatic "cutting rules" have recently been developed for the wavefunction of the Universe which determines cosmological correlation functions. These leverage perturbative unitarity to relate particular "discontinuities" in…
We investigate the principles of quantum field theory using a stiff de Sitter space. We demonstrate that a non-unitary Lagrangian on a Euclidean AdS geometry can produce the perturbative expansion of late-time correlation functions to all…
We investigate cosmological correlators for conformally coupled $\phi^4$ theory in four-dimensional de Sitter space. These \textit{in-in} correlators differ from scattering amplitudes for massless particles in flat space due to the…
The space of inflationary models is vast, containing wide varieties of mechanisms, symmetries, and spectra of particles. Consequently, the space of observational signatures is similarly complex. Hence, it is natural to look for boundaries…
The concepts of Lorentz invariance of local (flat space) physics, and unitarity of time evolution and the S-matrix, are famously rigid and robust, admitting no obvious consistent theoretical deformations, and confirmed to incredible…
In the standard approach to deriving inflationary predictions, we evolve a vacuum state in time according to the rules of a given model. Since the only observables are the future values of correlators and not their time evolution, this…
Cosmological correlation functions are significantly more complex than their flat-space analogues, such as tree-level scattering amplitudes. While these amplitudes have simple analytic structure and clear factorisation properties,…
Recently it has been suggested that non-gaussian inflationary perturbations can be usefully analysed in terms of a putative dual gauge theory defined on the future conformal infinity generated by an accelerating cosmology. The problem is…
Recently considerable efforts have been devoted to computing cosmological correlators and the corresponding wavefunction coefficients, as well as understanding their analytical structures. In this note, we revisit the computation of these…