Snowmass white paper: The cosmological bootstrap

Abstract

This white paper summarizes recent progress in the cosmologicalbootstrap, an approach to the study of the statistics of primordialfluctuations from consistency with unitarity, locality and symmetryassumptions. We review the key ideas of the bootstrap method, with aneye towards future directions and ambitions of the program. Focusing onrecent progress involving de Sitter and quasi-de Sitter backgrounds, wehighlight the role of singularities and unitarity in constraining theform of the correlators. We also discuss nonperturbative formulations ofthe bootstrap, connections to anti-de Sitter space, and potentialimplications for holography.