Cosmological amplitudes in power-law FRW universe

Abstract

The correlators of large-scale fluctuations belong to the most important observables in modern cosmology. Recently, there have been considerable efforts in analytically understanding the cosmological correlators and the related wavefunction coefficients, which we collectively call cosmological amplitudes. In this work, we provide a set of simple rules to directly write down analytical answers for arbitrary tree-level amplitudes of conformal scalars with time-dependent interactions in power-law FRW universe. With the recently proposed family-tree decomposition method, we identify an over-complete set of multivariate hypergeometric functions, called family trees, to which all tree-level conformal scalar amplitudes can be easily reduced. Our method yields series expansions and monodromies of family trees in various kinematic limits, together with a large number of functional identities. The family trees are in a sense generalizations of polylogarithms and do reduce to polylogarithmic expressions for the cubic coupling in inflationary limit. We further show that all family trees can be decomposed into linear chains by taking shuffle products of all subfamilies, with which we find simple connection between bulk time integrals and boundary energy integrals.