A unified description for cosmological processes with scalars of arbitrary masses

Abstract

One of the deepest open problems in cosmology is to unveil the physics of the early universe, whose current leading proposed description is given by inflation, which anyhow lacks of a complete framework. While the standard approach to understand physical processes is to compute correlations at the end of the inflation following their time evolution from early times, it is actually more useful to try to understand which principles constrain the inflationary physics and how they translates into the mathematical form of the observables that describes it. Furthermore, what are among the pillars of our understanding of physics — locality, unitarity and causality — have started to be better understood in cosmology in recent years, and according to heuristic arguments, one or more of them can break down as energy increases and quantum gravity effects start to become more relevant. This implies that the standard language through which we understand high energy physics, i.e. QFT and GR, might not be the most adequate to describe the early universe and to extrapolate physics at arbitrarily high energies. In this talk, we present some recent progress in the quest for a deeper understanding of the early universe, in a way that the principles that might break at higher energies emerge from other, novel, mathematical, ones. We discuss a class of scalar toy models with arbitrary masses in arbitrary FRW cosmology and, one one side we provide new techniques to compute the wavefunctional of the universe in perturbation theory, and on the other we formulate a novel, first principles, mathematical definition for them. Such a definition is in terms of non-convex weighted polytopes- We discuss all the feature of such a definition, drawing all its consequences we understood so far. From a physics perspective it is the first time that a single geometrical object is able to provide a description of a wide classes of models including different states.

The link to join the seminar online is  https://meet.google.com/gfp-weqn-opo