Cutting Cosmological Correlators

Understand

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.