On the IR divergences in de Sitter space: loops, resummation and the semi-classical wavefunction

dc.creatorCéspedes, S
dc.creatorDavis, AC
dc.creatorWang, DG
dc.date2024-04-03T15:15:51Z
dc.date2024-04-02
dc.date2023-12-06
dc.date2024-04-03T15:15:50Z
dc.date.accessioned2026-08-03T03:09:44Z
dc.descriptionAcknowledgements: We acknowledge many inspiring discussions with Santiago Agui Salcedo, Carlos Duaso Pueyo, Scott Melville, Enrico Pajer, Guilherme Pimentel, Arttu Rajantie and Kostas Skenderis. SC is supported in by the STFC Consolidated Grants ST/T000791/1 and ST/X000575/1. DGW is supported by a Rubicon Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and partially by the VIDI grant with Project No. 680-47-535 from NWO and the STFC Consolidated Grants ST/T000694/1 and ST/X000664/1. ACD acknowledges partial support from STFC Consolidated Grant ST/T000694/1.
dc.description<jats:title>A<jats:sc>bstract</jats:sc> </jats:title><jats:p>In this paper, we revisit the infrared (IR) divergences in de Sitter (dS) space using the wavefunction method, and explicitly explore how the resummation of higher-order loops leads to the stochastic formalism. In light of recent developments of the cosmological bootstrap, we track the behaviour of these nontrivial IR effects from perturbation theory to the non-perturbative regime. Specifically, we first examine the perturbative computation of wavefunction coefficients, and show that there is a clear distinction between classical components from tree-level diagrams and quantum ones from loop processes. Cosmological correlators at loop level receive contributions from tree-level wavefunction coefficients, which we dub classical loops. This distinction significantly simplifies the analysis of loop-level IR divergences, as we find the leading contributions always come from these classical loops. Then we compare with correlators from the perturbative stochastic computation, and find the results there are essentially the ones from classical loops, while quantum loops are only present as subleading corrections. This demonstrates that the leading IR effects are contained in the semi-classical wavefunction which is a resummation of all the tree-level diagrams. With this insight, we go beyond perturbation theory and present a new derivation of the stochastic formalism using the saddle-point approximation. We show that the Fokker-Planck equation follows as a consequence of two effects: the drift from the Schrödinger equation that describes the bulk time evolution, and the diffusion from the Polchinski’s equation which corresponds to the exact renormalization group flow of the coarse-grained theory on the boundary. Our analysis highlights the precise and simple link between the stochastic formalism and the semi-classical wavefunction.</jats:p>
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dc.identifier1126-6708
dc.identifierjhep04(2024)004
dc.identifier23128
dc.identifierhttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/366634
dc.identifier1029-8479
dc.identifier.urihttps://repo.dare.co.zw/handle/123456789/173510
dc.languageen
dc.languageeng
dc.publisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC
dc.publisherhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/jhep04(2024)004
dc.subject5106 Nuclear and Plasma Physics
dc.subject5107 Particle and High Energy Physics
dc.subject4902 Mathematical Physics
dc.subject49 Mathematical Sciences
dc.subject51 Physical Sciences
dc.titleOn the IR divergences in de Sitter space: loops, resummation and the semi-classical wavefunction
dc.typeArticle

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