String Theory seminar - Charlotte Sleight Seminar

Abstract: The last decade has seen significant progress in our understanding of scattering in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. Through the AdS/CFT correspondence, we can reformulate scattering processes in AdS in terms of correlation functions in Conformal Field Theory (CFT), which are sharply defined by the requirements of Conformal Symmetry, Unitarity and a consistent Operator Product expansion. Accordingly, numerous highly effective techniques for the study of scattering in AdS have been developed. This has been driven largely by the Conformal Bootstrap programme, which aims to carve out the space of consistent CFTs (and, in turn, quantum gravities in AdS space) principally through the three basic consistency requirements above. In this talk I will describe some steps towards extending some of these techniques and results to boundary correlators in de Sitter (dS) space. Compared to AdS, we have little grasp of the properties required of consistent correlation functions in Euclidean CFTs dual to physics in dS. The boundaries at infinity in dS are space-like with no standard notion of locality and time, so the basic criteria that underpin the Conformal Bootstrap programme do not directly apply to the corresponding programme in dS, the so-called Cosmological bootstrap. I will show how boundary correlators in AdS and dS can be placed on a similar footing by introducing a Mellin-Barnes representation in momentum space, providing a framework that could facilitate bridging the gap between the Conformal and Cosmological bootstrap programmes. I will then discuss how the Mellin-Barnes representation itself can be a useful tool to study boundary correlators both in AdS and dS.