Late-time Structure of the Bunch-Davies De Sitter Wavefunction

TL;DR

This paper investigates the late-time behavior of the Bunch-Davies wavefunction in de Sitter space, revealing logarithmic growth in certain scalar and gauge field contributions and exploring holographic interpretations.

Contribution

It applies perturbative AdS/CFT techniques to analyze the wavefunction's late-time structure, including loop effects and gauge/graviton sectors, with holographic insights.

Findings

Logarithmic growth in scalar and gauge field contributions at late times.

No logarithmic growth in pure graviton sector at tree level.

Holographic interpretation of logarithmic behaviors in conformal field theory.

Abstract

We examine the late time behavior of the Bunch-Davies wavefunction for interacting light fields in a de Sitter background. We use perturbative techniques developed in the framework of AdS/CFT, and analytically continue to compute tree and loop level contributions to the Bunch-Davies wavefunction. We consider self-interacting scalars of general mass, but focus especially on the massless and conformally coupled cases. We show that certain contributions grow logarithmically in conformal time both at tree and loop level. We also consider gauge fields and gravitons. The four-dimensional Fefferman-Graham expansion of classical asymptotically de Sitter solutions is used to show that the wavefunction contains no logarithmic growth in the pure graviton sector at tree level. Finally, assuming a holographic relation between the wavefunction and the partition function of a conformal field theory, we interpret the logarithmic growths in the language of conformal field theory.