The cosmological bootstrap: weight-shifting operators and scalar seeds

By D. Baumann, C. D. Pueyo, A. Joyce, Hayden Lee, G. L. Pimentel. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2019

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A key insight of the bootstrap approach to cosmological correlations is the fact that all correlators of slow-roll inflation can be reduced to a unique building block — the four-point function of conformally coupled scalars, arising from the exchange of a massive scalar. Correlators corresponding to the exchange of particles with spin are then obtained by applying a spin-raising operator to the scalar-exchange solution. Similarly, the correlators of massless external fields can be derived by acting with a suitable weight-raising operator. In this paper, we present a systematic and highly streamlined derivation of these operators (and their generalizations) using tools of conformal field theory. Our results greatly simplify the theoretical foundations of the cosmological bootstrap program.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcad3334b29f9a85cca1d0fe9c517396631299d7

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. H. Goodhew
4. Sadra Jazayeri
5. A. Joyce
6. Hayden Lee
7. C. D. Pueyo
8. G. L. Pimentel

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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

Citations in the corpus

• The Cosmological Optical Theorem (2020, result): “This would generalize the very interesting results recently derived in [9, 21, 24] using de Sitter isometries to more phenomenologically interesting models.”
• The Cosmological Bootstrap: Spinning correlators from symmetries and factorization (2020, methodology): “In [47], the bootstrap philosophy was applied to the study of inflationary scalar correlators (see also [48–54] for related work).”
• Building a boostless bootstrap for the bispectrum (2020, methodology): “These singularities have been the focus of much recent interest in the literature [23, 25, 26, 14, 15, 19, 27].”