On the Asymptotic Nature of Cosmological Effective Theories

TL;DR

This paper reveals that cosmological effective field theories are inherently asymptotic due to factorial growth of operator contributions in expanding spacetimes, affecting their convergence and predictive power.

Contribution

It demonstrates the asymptotic nature of cosmological EFTs and introduces resummation methods to extract meaningful predictions, contrasting with flat spacetime EFT behavior.

Findings

Operator contributions grow factorially with dimension in expanding backgrounds.

EFT predictions can be recovered through resummation techniques.

In the infinite sound speed limit, EFT reproduces full theory results.

Abstract

Much of our intuition about Effective Field Theories (EFTs) stems from their formulation in flat spacetime, yet EFTs have become indispensable tools in cosmology, where time-dependent backgrounds are the norm. In this work, we demonstrate that in spacetimes undergoing significant expansion-such as accelerated FLRW and de Sitter backgrounds-the contributions of operators with mass dimension $\Delta$ to physical observables grow factorially with $\Delta$ at fixed couplings. This behavior stands in stark contrast to static flat spacetime. As a result, the cosmological EFT expansion is generally asymptotic rather than convergent, even at tree level. To illustrate this phenomenon, we analyze simple toy models involving a massless or conformally coupled scalar field interacting with a heavy scalar with zero or infinite sound speed. We demonstrate that meaningful EFT predictions can still be extracted via appropriate resummation techniques, performed in both Fourier and Mellin-momentum space. In the infinite sound speed limit, where the heavy field is effectively non-dynamical, the resummed EFT reproduces the exact result of the full theory. In other cases, the EFT captures only the local part of the dynamics, omitting nonlocal terms, which are exponentially suppressed in the large-mass limit for the Bunch-Davies state. Our results provide detailed and quantitative expectations for more general cosmological EFTs.