Inflation in Flatland

Abstract

We investigate the symmetry structure of inflation in 2+1 dimensions. In particular, we show that the asymptotic symmetries of three-dimensional de Sitter space are in one-to-one correspondence with cosmological adiabatic modes for the curvature perturbation. In 2+1 dimensions, the asymptotic symmetry algebra is infinite-dimensional, given by two copies of the Virasoro algebra, and can be traced to the conformal symmetries of the two-dimensional spatial slices of de Sitter. We study the consequences of this infinite-dimensional symmetry for inflationary correlation functions, finding new soft theorems that hold only in 2+1 dimensions. Expanding the correlation functions as a power series in the soft momentum q, these relations constrain the traceless part of the tensorial coefficient at each order in q in terms of a lower-point function. As a check, we verify that the \U0001d4aa(q2) identity is satisfied by inflationary correlation functions in the limit of small sound speed.