Late-time structure of the Bunch-Davies de Sitter wavefunction

By Dionysios Anninos, Tarek Anous, D. Freedman, George Konstantinidis. 2014

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the late time behavior of the Bunch-Davies wavefunction for interacting light fields in a de Sitter background. We use perturbative techniques developed in the framework of AdS/CFT, and analytically continue to compute tree and loop level contributions to the Bunch-Davies wavefunction. We consider self-interacting scalars of general mass, but focus especially on the massless and conformally coupled cases. We show that certain contributions grow logarithmically in conformal time both at tree and loop level. We also consider gauge fields and gravitons. The four-dimensional Fefferman-Graham expansion of classical asymptotically de Sitter solutions is used to show that the wavefunction contains no logarithmic growth in the pure graviton sector at tree level. Finally, assuming a holographic relation between the wavefunction and the partition function of a conformal field theory, we interpret the logarithmic growths in the language of conformal field theory.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c00b3e0cf96f9f97283320ad74092fde71b90ef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. E. Pajer
2. D. Baumann
3. Hayden Lee
4. A. Joyce
5. G. L. Pimentel
6. C. D. Pueyo
7. H. Goodhew
8. Sadra Jazayeri

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. E. Pajer
2. D. Baumann
3. G. L. Pimentel
4. Hayden Lee
5. A. Joyce
6. C. D. Pueyo
7. H. Goodhew
8. Sadra Jazayeri

Citations in the corpus

• A Mellin space approach to cosmological correlators (2019, background): “This extends to general d and n the result obtained for d = 3, n = 4 in [11], and d = 3, n = 3 in [97] (see also [8, 98]).”
• The Cosmological Optical Theorem (2020, background): “The objects of ultimate interest are correlators that can be derived from the coefficients appearing in the wavefunction of the universe Ψ (see appendix A and [34, 35] for more details3).”
• Cosmological Polytopes and the Wavefunction of the Universe (2017, background): “2The late-time behavior of the perturbative wavefunction for purely conformally coupled case in fourdimensional de Sitter space-time has been discussed in [17].”
• Bootstrapping inflationary correlators in Mellin space (2019, methodology): “1The relation between correlators in AdS and dS through analytic continuation has been considered in previous works [40–42].”
• The cosmological bootstrap: weight-shifting operators and scalar seeds (2019, methodology): “Given this representation of the quantum state, we can reconstruct correlation functions by squaring the wavefunction and integrating over the late-time field profiles in the usual way [16, 18, 68].”
• The Cosmological Bootstrap: Spinning correlators from symmetries and factorization (2020, background): “[30, 110] for more details), and then use them to investigate the types of singularities that can arise.”