Related papers: Positivity from Cosmological Correlators
Cosmological models often contain scalar fields, which can acquire global nonzero expectation values that change with the comoving time. Among the possible consequences of these scalar-field backgrounds, an accelerated cosmological…
Scalars are widely used in cosmology to model novel phenomena such as the late-time cosmic acceleration. These are effective field theories with highly nonlinear interactions, including Horndeski theory/generalized galileon and beyond. We…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
Dimensional reduction has proven to be a surprisingly powerful tool for delineating the boundary between the string landscape and the swampland. Bounds from the Weak Gravity Conjecture and the Repulsive Force Conjecture, for instance, are…
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…
In this paper, we consider spatially flat FLRW cosmological models in two contexts in an attempt to derive a set of conditions that characterize when such models exhibit oscillatory behaviour. In the first case, we consider a spatially flat…
Cosmological acceleration is difficult to accommodate in theories of fundamental interactions involving supergravity and superstrings. An alternative is that the acceleration is not universal but happens in a large localized region, which…
We discuss the notion that quantum fields may induce an effective time-dependent cosmological constant which decays from a large initial value. It is shown that such cosmological models are viable in a non-de Sitter spacetime.
We consider here the dynamics of some homogeneous and isotropic cosmological models with $N$ interacting classical scalar fields non-minimally coupled to the spacetime curvature, as an attempt to generalize some recent results obtained for…
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 study a particular version of the theory of cosmological $\alpha$-attractors with $\alpha=1/3$, in which both the dilaton (inflaton) field and the axion field are light during inflation. The kinetic terms in this theory originate from…
Complex scalar fields charged under approximate $U(1)$ symmetries appear in well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model. One example is the field that contains the QCD axion field associated with the Peccei-Quinn symmetry; others…
We investigate two different definitions of a scalar field effective potential in quantum field theory in de Sitter spacetime: the standard textbook definition, and the constraint effective potential proposed by O'Raifeartaigh et al. in…
Certain exotic phenomena in general relativity, such as backward time travel, appear to require the presence of matter with negative energy. While quantum fields are a possible source of negative energy densities, there are lower bounds -…
We provide a general formalism to calculate the infrared correlators of multiple interacting scalar fields in the de Sitter space by means of the stochastic approach. These scalar fields are treated as test fields and hence our result is…
We continue developing cosmological models involving nilpotent chiral superfields, which provide a simple unified description of inflation and the current acceleration of the universe in the supergravity context. We describe here a general…
Using the Schwinger-Keldysh-formalism, reformulated in arXiv:2108.01695 as an effective field theory in Euclidean anti-de Sitter, we evaluate the one-loop cosmological four-point function of a conformally coupled interacting scalar field in…
A calculation of the one-mode occupation numbers for vacuum fluctuations of massive fields in De Sitter space shows that their use for the generation of classical density perturbations in inflationary cosmology very much depends on their…
Scalar weak gravity conjectures (SWGCs) attempt to pinpoint the ranges of couplings consistent with a fundamental theory of all interactions. We identify a generic dynamical consequence of these conjectures for cosmology and show that SWGCs…
Perturbative quantum field theory in de Sitter space is known to give rise to a variety of contributions that diverge with time (secular terms). Despite significant progress, a complete understanding of the physical origin of these…