The subtle simplicity of cosmological correlators
Chandramouli Chowdhury, Arthur Lipstein, Jiajie Mei, Ivo Sachs, Pierre Vanhove
Abstract
A bstract We investigate cosmological correlators for conformally coupled ϕ 4 theory in four-dimensional de Sitter space. These in-in correlators differ from scattering amplitudes for massless particles in flat space due to the spacelike structure of future infinity in de Sitter. They also require a regularization which preserves de Sitter-invariance, which makes the flat space limit subtle to define at loop-level. Nevertheless we find that up to two loops, the in-in correlators are structurally simpler than the wave function and have the same transcendentality as flat space amplitudes. Moreover, we show that their loop integrands can be recast in terms of flat space integrands and can be derived from a novel recursion relation.