English

Propagator positivity bounds for cosmological correlators

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-12-25 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Using unitarity and causality, we derive an infinite tower of two-sided positivity bounds on the effective field theory coefficients which describe the propagation of heavy fields on de Sitter spacetime. We design this EFT to describe propagators with the in-in boundary conditions that are relevant for cosmological correlators. Our positivity bounds therefore identify EFT correlators that can never emerge from a consistent underlying model of inflation. This implies non-trivial constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity; for instance the cosmological collider oscillations in the squeezed bispectrum from the exchange of a heavy scalar are tied to the shape of its EFT background.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.20706,
  title  = {Propagator positivity bounds for cosmological correlators},
  author = {Mang Hei Gordon Lee and Scott Melville},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.20706},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:39:09.952Z