arXiv subjects

Mang Hei Gordon Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Mang Hei Gordon Lee.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Propagator positivity bounds for cosmological correlators

Using unitarity and causality, we derive an infinite tower of two-sided positivity bounds on the effective field theory coefficients which describe the propagation of heavy fields on de Sitter spacetime. We design this EFT to describe propagators with the in-in boundary conditions that are relevant for cosmological correlators. Our positivity bounds therefore identify EFT correlators that can never emerge from a consistent underlying model of inflation. This implies non-trivial constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity; for instance the cosmological collider oscillations in the squeezed bispectrum from the exchange of a heavy scalar are tied to the shape of its EFT background.

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arXiv2026

The Cosmological Grassmannian

We introduce the orthogonal Grassmannian as a novel kinematic space for describing correlators of massless spinning fields in de Sitter space. By automatically encoding the constraints of conformal symmetry and current conservation, the formalism drastically simplifies these correlators. We show that three-point functions are fixed by little group covariance and take the same form as the corresponding Schwinger-parameterized correlators in twistor space. The power of the Grassmannian approach is especially evident for four-point functions, which require dynamical input beyond kinematics. We demonstrate that unitarity enforces the same factorization properties as for scattering amplitudes and use these to bootstrap the four-point functions in several non-trivial examples, including Yang-Mills theory and gravity. We find expressions that are astonishingly simple and reveal a close connection to the corresponding scattering amplitudes. Our results suggest that the Grassmannian provides the natural language for spinning correlators in de Sitter space and illuminates their geometric origin.

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arXiv2025

Singularities in Cosmological Loop Correlators

In this work we perform a systematic study of the singularity structure of inflationary correlations at 1-loop. We explicitly compute a few diagrams and find a pattern emerging in the singularities produced. Motivated by this, we derive diagrammatic rules to extract the singularities of any two-site 1-loop diagram. Using these rules, the poles and branch cuts produced can be predicted by simply identifying the energies flowing through certain subgraphs, without having to perform complicated integrals. We demonstrate how these rules follow by analyzing the general structure of the time and momentum integrals of the correlators. An interesting feature of de-Sitter correlators at 1-loop is the presence of an off-shell total energy branch point, which is present in dimensional regularization as well as cutoff regularization. We probe the source of this branch cut in detail, while revisiting the cosmological KLN theorem (arXiv:2308.00680) in this context. Finally, we show that the branch cuts produced in a renormalised correlator always repackage themselves in a dilatation invariant form to produce logarithms of ratios of comoving scales.

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arXiv2024

Records from the S-Matrix Marathon: A Timeless History of Time

By directly probing the initial conditions of our universe, cosmological surveys offer us a unique observational handle on quantum field theory in curved spacetime with dynamical gravity and might even allow us to glean information about a full theory of quantum gravity. Here we report on recent progress to study the natural observables in the problem, namely cosmological correlators. After setting the stage, we review results from three different approaches. First, we present the in-out formalism as an interesting alternative to the well-known in-in formalism and stress some of its advantages, such as the derivation of recursion relations, correlators cutting rules and a proposal for a de Sitter scattering matrix. Second, we tackle the important open problem of constructing effective theories in curved spacetime, which generally requires an open quantum system approach. Third, we provide an executive summary of general properties of the field-theoretic wavefunction that follow from symmetries, unitarity, causality and locality. We describe how these properties can be leveraged to bootstrap all tree-level results and we discuss loop contributions. These notes are based on a series of lectures held during the S-Matrix Marathon workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study on 11-22 March 2024.

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arXiv2024

From Amplitudes to Analytic Wavefunctions

The field-theoretic wavefunction has received renewed attention with the goal of better understanding observables at the boundary of de Sitter spacetime and studying the interior of Minkowski or general FLRW spacetime. Understanding the analytic structure of the wavefunction potentially allows us to establish bounds on physical observables. In this paper we develop an amplitude representation for the flat space wavefunction, which allow us to write the flat space wavefunction as an amplitude-like Feynman integral integrated over an energy-fixing kernel. With this representation it is possible to separate the wavefunction into an amplitude part and a subleading part which is less divergent as the total energy goes to zero. In turn the singularities of the wavefunction can be classified into two sets: amplitude-type singularities, which can be mapped to singularities found in amplitudes (including anomalous thresholds), and wavefunction-type singularities, which are unique to the wavefunction. As an example we study several tree level and one loop diagrams for scalars, and explore their singularities in detail.

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arXiv2023

Leading Loops in Cosmological Correlators

Cosmological correlators from inflation are often generated at tree level and hence loop contributions are bounded to be small corrections by perturbativity. Here we discuss a scenario where this is not the case. Recently, it has been shown that for any number of scalar fields of any mass, the parity-odd trispectrum of a massless scalar must vanish in the limit of exact scale invariance due to unitarity and the choice of initial state. By carefully handling UV-divergences, we show that the one-loop contribution is non-vanishing and hence leading. Surprisingly, the one-loop parity-odd trispectrum is simply a rational function of kinematics, which we compute explicitly in a series of models, including single-clock inflation. Although the loop contribution is the leading term in the parity-odd sector, its signal-to-noise ratio is typically bounded from above by that of a corresponding tree-level parity-even trispectrum, unless instrumental noise and systematics for the two observables differ. Furthermore, we identify a series of loop contributions to the wavefunction that cancel exactly when computing correlators, suggesting a more general phenomenon.

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arXiv2022

The Analytic Wavefunction

The wavefunction in quantum field theory is an invaluable tool for tackling a variety of problems, including probing the interior of Minkowski spacetime and modelling boundary observables in de Sitter spacetime. Here we study the analytic structure of wavefunction coefficients in Minkowski as a function of their kinematics. We introduce an off-shell wavefunction in terms of amputated time-ordered correlation functions and show that it is analytic in the complex energy plane except for possible singularities on the negative real axis. These singularities are determined to all loop orders by a simple energy-conservation condition. We confirm this picture by developing a Landau analysis of wavefunction loop integrals and corroborate our findings with several explicit calculations in scalar field theories. This analytic structure allows us to derive new UV/IR sum rules for the wavefunction that fix the coefficients in its low-energy expansion in terms of integrals of discontinuities in the corresponding UV-completion. In contrast to the analogous sum rules for scattering amplitudes, the wavefunction sum rules can also constrain total-derivative interactions. We explicitly verify these new relations at one-loop order in simple UV models of a light and a heavy scalar. Our results, which apply to both Lorentz invariant and boost-breaking theories, pave the way towards deriving wavefunction positivity bounds in flat and cosmological spacetimes.

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arXiv2021

Cutting Cosmological Correlators

The initial conditions of our universe appear to us in the form of a classical probability distribution that we probe with cosmological observations. In the current leading paradigm, this probability distribution arises from a quantum mechanical wavefunction of the universe. Here we ask what the imprint of quantum mechanics is on the late time observables. We show that the requirement of unitary time evolution, colloquially the conservation of probabilities, fixes the analytic structure of the wavefunction and of all the cosmological correlators it encodes. In particular, we derive in perturbation theory an infinite set of single-cut rules that generalize the Cosmological Optical Theorem and relate a certain discontinuity of any tree-level $n$-point function to that of lower-point functions. Our rules are closely related to, but distinct from the recently derived Cosmological Cutting Rules. They follow from the choice of the Bunch-Davies vacuum and a simple property of the (bulk-to-bulk) propagator and are astoundingly general: we prove that they are valid for fields with a linear dispersion relation and any mass, any integer spin and arbitrary local interactions with any number of derivatives. They also apply to general FLRW spacetimes admitting a Bunch-Davies vacuum, including de Sitter, slow-roll inflation, power-law cosmologies and even resonant oscillations in axion monodromy. We verify the single-cut rules in a number of non-trivial examples, including four massless scalars exchanging a massive scalar, as relevant for cosmological collider physics, four gravitons exchanging a graviton, and a scalar five-point function.

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arXiv2018

Connections between Minkowski and Cosmological Correlation Functions

We show how cosmological correlation functions of massless fields can be rewritten in terms of Minkowski correlation functions, by extracting symmetry-breaking operators from the cosmological correlators. This technique simplifies some cosmological calculations. Also, known properties of Minkowski correlation functions can be translated to non-trivial properties of cosmological correlations. To illustrate this idea, inflation to Minkowski and matter bounce to Minkowski relations are presented for the interactions of general single field inflation. And a Minkowski recursion relation is translated to a novel relation for inflation.

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arXiv2017

Possible coexistence of double-Q magnetic order and chequerboard charge order in the re-entrant tetragonal phase of Ba0.76K0.24Fe2As2

We investigate the re-entrant tetragonal phase in the iron-based superconductor Ba0 .76K0.24Fe2As2 by DC magnetization and thermoelectrical measurements. The reversible magnetization confirms by a thermodynamic method that the spin alignment in the re-entrant C4 phase is out-of-plane, in agreement with an itinerant double-Q magnetic order [Allred et al., Nat. Phys. 12, 493 (2016)]. The Nernst coefficient shows the typical unusually large negative value in the stripe-type spin density wave (SDW) state owing to the Fermi surface reconstruction associated with SDW and nematic order. At the transition into the re-entrant C4 tetragonal phase it hardly changes, which could indicate that instead of a complete vanishing of the associated charge order, the spin reorientation could trigger a redistribution of the charges to form a secondary charge order, e.g. in form of a chequerboard-like pattern that no longer breaks the rotational C4 symmetry.

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