Towards the non-perturbative cosmological bootstrap

Abstract: We study quantum field theory on a de Sitter spacetime dS$_{d+1}$ background. Our main tool is the Hilbert space decomposition in irreducible unitary representations of its isometry group $SO(d+1,1)$. As the first application of the Hilbert space formalism, we recover the K\"allen-Lehmann spectral decomposition of the scalar bulk two-point function. In the process, we exhibit a relation between poles in the corresponding spectral densities and the boundary CFT data. Moreover, we derive an inversion formula for the spectral density through analytical continuation from the sphere and use it to find the spectral decompisiton for a few examples. Next, we study the conformal partial wave decomposition of the four-point functions of boundary operators. These correlation functions are very similar to the ones of standard conformal field theory, but have different positivity properties that follow from unitarity in de Sitter. We conclude by proposing a non-perturbative conformal bootstrap approach to the study of these late-time four-point functions, and we illustrate our proposal with a concrete example for QFT in dS$_2$.