All-Loop Renormalization and the Phase of the de Sitter Wavefunction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Farren, Alexander, McCulloch, Ciaran, Pajer, Enrico, Tong, Xi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Farren, Alexander
McCulloch, Ciaran
Pajer, Enrico
Tong, Xi
author_facet Farren, Alexander
McCulloch, Ciaran
Pajer, Enrico
Tong, Xi
contents Cosmological observables of the primordial universe are encoded in the late-time field-theoretic wavefunction. For shift-symmetric scalars in de Sitter, a good approximation for many inflationary models, the wavefunction must be purely real at tree-level. This property is violated by a quantum anomaly in the process of renormalization. As a result, we show that the imaginary part of the wavefunction is fixed by its dependence on the renormalization scale to all loop orders in perturbation theory. This follows from unitarity, locality, dilation isometry and a Bunch-Davies state. The compact relation we uncover for the wavefunction implies an infinite set of relations among correlators of massless fields and their conjugate momenta, which we exemplify at one-loop order.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_08794
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle All-Loop Renormalization and the Phase of the de Sitter Wavefunction
Farren, Alexander
McCulloch, Ciaran
Pajer, Enrico
Tong, Xi
High Energy Physics - Theory
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Cosmological observables of the primordial universe are encoded in the late-time field-theoretic wavefunction. For shift-symmetric scalars in de Sitter, a good approximation for many inflationary models, the wavefunction must be purely real at tree-level. This property is violated by a quantum anomaly in the process of renormalization. As a result, we show that the imaginary part of the wavefunction is fixed by its dependence on the renormalization scale to all loop orders in perturbation theory. This follows from unitarity, locality, dilation isometry and a Bunch-Davies state. The compact relation we uncover for the wavefunction implies an infinite set of relations among correlators of massless fields and their conjugate momenta, which we exemplify at one-loop order.
title All-Loop Renormalization and the Phase of the de Sitter Wavefunction
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08794