Open Effective Field Theories for cosmology

Abstract

When energy is not conserved, imprints of new physics on observable cosmology might not follow the rules of local effective actions. By capturing dissipative and diffusive effects, open effective field theories account for the possibly non-Hamiltonian evolution of cosmological inhomogeneities interacting with an unspecified environment. In this proceeding, we briefly discuss recent progress made towards their implementation in primordial cosmology. Our approach recovers the usual effective field theory of inflation in a certain limit and extends it to account for local dissipation and noises. Non-Gaussianities are generated that peak in the equilateral configuration for large dissipation and in the folded configurations for small dissipation. The construction provides an embedding for local dissipative models of inflation and a framework to study quantum information aspects of the inflationary models.