A Mellin Space Approach to Cosmological Correlators

Abstract

We propose a Mellin space approach to the evaluation of late-time momentum-space correlation functions of quantum fields in $\left(d+1\right)$-dimensional de Sitter space. The Mellin-Barnes representation makes manifest the analytic structure of late-time correlators and, more generally, provides a convenient general $d$ framework for the study of conformal correlators in momentum space. In this work we focus on tree-level correlation functions of general scalars as a prototype, including $n$-point contact diagrams and $4$-point exchanges. For generic scalars, both the contact and exchange diagrams are given by (generalised) Hypergeometric functions, which reduce to existing expressions available in the literature for $d=3$ and external scalars which are either simultaneously conformally coupled or massless. This approach can also be used for the perturbative bulk evaluation of momentum-space boundary correlators in $\left(d+1\right)$-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (Witten diagrams).