Cosmological correlators in massless ϕ4-theory and the method of regions

Abstract

The calculation of loop corrections to the correlation functions of quantum fields during inflation or in the de Sitter background presents greater challenges than in flat space due to the more complicated form of the mode functions. While in flat space highly sophisticated approaches to Feynman integrals exist, similar tools still remain to be developed for cosmological correlators. However, usually only their late-time limit is of interest. We introduce the method-of-region expansion for cosmological correlators as a tool to extract the late-time limit, and illustrate it with several examples for the interacting, massless, minimally coupled scalar field in de Sitter space. In particular, we consider the in-in correlator 〈ϕ2(η, q)ϕ(η, k1)ϕ(η, k2)〉, whose region structure is relevant to anomalous dimensions and matching coefficients in Soft de Sitter effective theory.