Bootstrapping Inflationary Correlators

Hayden Lee of Harvard University will give the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (SITP) Monday Colloquium.

Abstract: In flat space, symmetries and singularities can be used to fully determine the structure of 4-particle scattering amplitudes at tree level. In this talk, I will describe how a similar logic can be used to uniquely fix the structure of tree-level inflationary correlation functions with approximate conformal symmetry. I will present analytic solutions for the inflationary 3- and 4-point functions of conformally-coupled/massless scalars with arbitrary spin exchange, and show how these objects are related to each other via simple differential operators. As a result, the most general 3- and 4-point functions arising from weakly broken conformal symmetry are fully characterized by a few basis functions up to coupling constants. Moreover, these inflationary correlators “contain” flat-space scattering amplitudes via analytic continuation, providing a nontrivial link between scattering in flat space and particle production in curved space