Snowmass White Paper: The Cosmological Bootstrap

Daniel Baumann, Daniel Green, Austin Joyce, Enrico Pajer, Guilherme L. Pimentel, Charlotte Sleight, Massimo Taronna

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arXiv
2203.08121
Date
2022-03-15
Frontier
Theory Frontier (TF)
Topical groups
Submitted by
Daniel Green

Abstract

This white paper summarizes recent progress in the cosmological bootstrap, an approach to the study of the statistics of primordial fluctuations from consistency with unitarity, locality and symmetry assumptions. We review the key ideas of the bootstrap method, with an eye towards future directions and ambitions of the program. Focusing on recent progress involving de Sitter and quasi-de Sitter backgrounds, we highlight the role of singularities and unitarity in constraining the form of the correlators. We also discuss nonperturbative formulations of the bootstrap, connections to anti-de Sitter space, and potential implications for holography.