On the proper treatment of massless fields in Euclidean de Sitter space

Abstract

We analyze infrared divergences arising in calculations involving light and massless fields in de Sitter space. We show that these arise from an incorrect treatment of the constant mode of the field, and show that a correct quantization leads to a well-defined and calculable perturbation expansion. We illustrate this by computing the first nontrivial loop correction in a theory of a massless scalar field with a quartic interaction.