Snowmass White Paper: The Cosmological Bootstrap

TL;DR

This white paper reviews recent advances in the cosmological bootstrap, a method leveraging unitarity, locality, and symmetry to constrain primordial fluctuation correlators in early universe models.

Contribution

It summarizes key ideas, recent progress, and future directions in the cosmological bootstrap approach, emphasizing singularities, unitarity, and nonperturbative formulations.

Findings

Constraints on correlators from unitarity and singularities

Progress in bootstrap methods for de Sitter backgrounds

Connections to anti-de Sitter space and holography

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.