Inflation and Conformal Invariance: The Perspective from Radial Quantization

Understand

According to the dS/CFT correspondence, correlators of fields generated during a primordial de Sitter phase are constrained by three-dimensional conformal invariance.

• Using the properties of radially quantized conformal field theories and the operator-state correspondence, we glean information on some points.
• The Higuchi bound on the masses of spin-s states in de Sitter is a direct consequence of reflection positivity in radially quantized CFT$_3$ and the fact that scaling dimensions of operators are energies of states.
• The partial massless states appearing in de Sitter correspond from the boundary CFT$_3$ perspective to boundary states with highest weight for the conformal group.