Cosmological Correlator Discontinuities from Scattering Amplitudes

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chowdhury, Chandramouli, Jazayeri, Sadra, Lipstein, Arthur, Marshall, Joe, Mei, Jiajie, Sachs, Ivo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Chowdhury, Chandramouli
Jazayeri, Sadra
Lipstein, Arthur
Marshall, Joe
Mei, Jiajie
Sachs, Ivo
author_facet Chowdhury, Chandramouli
Jazayeri, Sadra
Lipstein, Arthur
Marshall, Joe
Mei, Jiajie
Sachs, Ivo
contents Recent theoretical work has revealed that basic observables of quantum field theory in de Sitter space, known as in-in or cosmological correlators, exhibit surprisingly simple mathematical structure reminiscent of scattering amplitudes in flat space. For many theories, this simplicity can be made manifest using a set of ``cosmological dressing rules'' which uplift flat-space Feynman diagrams to in-in correlators in de Sitter space by attaching auxiliary propagators to the interaction vertices. In this paper, we show that discontinuities of cosmological correlators with respect to internal energy variables can be obtained by applying auxiliary propagators to unitarity cuts of flat space Feynman diagrams. Moreover, discontinuities with respect to external energy variables can be obtained by cutting auxiliary propagators attached to Feynman diagrams. This observation in turn implies highly non-trivial constraints on cosmological correlators in the form of simple sum rules. We illustrate these ideas in a number of examples at tree-level and 1-loop for conformally coupled scalar theories, although they hold more generally. Finally, we show how to reconstruct cosmological correlators from their discontinuities using dispersion relations, providing a powerful new approach to computing cosmological observables by systematically reconstructing them from data uplifted from flat space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cosmological Correlator Discontinuities from Scattering Amplitudes
Chowdhury, Chandramouli
Jazayeri, Sadra
Lipstein, Arthur
Marshall, Joe
Mei, Jiajie
Sachs, Ivo
High Energy Physics - Theory
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Recent theoretical work has revealed that basic observables of quantum field theory in de Sitter space, known as in-in or cosmological correlators, exhibit surprisingly simple mathematical structure reminiscent of scattering amplitudes in flat space. For many theories, this simplicity can be made manifest using a set of ``cosmological dressing rules'' which uplift flat-space Feynman diagrams to in-in correlators in de Sitter space by attaching auxiliary propagators to the interaction vertices. In this paper, we show that discontinuities of cosmological correlators with respect to internal energy variables can be obtained by applying auxiliary propagators to unitarity cuts of flat space Feynman diagrams. Moreover, discontinuities with respect to external energy variables can be obtained by cutting auxiliary propagators attached to Feynman diagrams. This observation in turn implies highly non-trivial constraints on cosmological correlators in the form of simple sum rules. We illustrate these ideas in a number of examples at tree-level and 1-loop for conformally coupled scalar theories, although they hold more generally. Finally, we show how to reconstruct cosmological correlators from their discontinuities using dispersion relations, providing a powerful new approach to computing cosmological observables by systematically reconstructing them from data uplifted from flat space.
title Cosmological Correlator Discontinuities from Scattering Amplitudes
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03841