Inflationary Tailoring: Dressing and Cutting in the Early Universe

The hypothesised period of the early universe known as inflation is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it is a regime in which both quantum effects and the curvature of spacetime are important, and the characteristic energy scale is very high, meaning beyond-standard-model physics could play a role. Secondly, the effects of quantum fluctuations during this period ought to be observable in the cosmic microwave background today. And thirdly, inflation is approximately described by de Sitter space; a maximally symmetric spacetime which many believe ought to permit a holographic description.

In this context, wavefunction coefficients have been studied for many years now, being the objects hypothesised to be dual to CFT correlators in a holographic description. However, they are not the observable quantities. In-in correlators are constructed from wavefunction coefficients and yet, remarkably, recent evidence suggests that they are often simpler objects than their constituent parts. In this talk, I will explain how in-in correlators in de Sitter can be directly uplifted from flat-space amplitudes via “dressing rules” for particular theories. We will then see how the analytic properties of these correlators can be investigated by applying standard unitarity cutting methods from flat space to this representation.