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<article article-type="research-article" dtd-version="1.1" xml:lang="en"><front xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:c="http://ns.iop.org/namespaces/content" xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions" xmlns:m="http://ns.iop.org/namespaces/meta"><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">jcap</journal-id><journal-title-group><journal-title xml:lang="en">Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics</journal-title><abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher" xml:lang="en">J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.</abbrev-journal-title></journal-title-group><issn pub-type="epub">1475-7516</issn><publisher><publisher-name>IOP Publishing</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">JCAP_088P_0920</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.1088/1475-7516/2021/04/021</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="manuscript">JCAP_088P_0920</article-id><article-categories><subj-group subj-group-type="display-article-type"><subject>paper</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>The Cosmological Optical Theorem</article-title></title-group><contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Goodhew</surname><given-names>Harry</given-names></name><xref ref-type="aff" rid="affiliation01">1</xref><email>hfg23@damtp.cam.ac.uk</email></contrib><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jazayeri</surname><given-names>Sadra</given-names></name><xref ref-type="aff" rid="affiliation01">1</xref><email>sj571@damtp.cam.ac.uk</email></contrib><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pajer</surname><given-names>Enrico</given-names></name><xref ref-type="aff" rid="affiliation01">1</xref><email>ep551@damtp.cam.ac.uk</email></contrib><aff id="affiliation01">
               <label>1</label>Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge,  Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, <country>U.K.</country>
            </aff></contrib-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>4</month><year>2021</year></pub-date><pub-date pub-type="epub"><day>9</day><month>4</month><year>2021</year></pub-date><pub-date pub-type="open-access"><day>9</day><month>4</month><year>2021</year></pub-date><volume>2021</volume><issue>04</issue><elocation-id content-type="artnum">021</elocation-id><history><date date-type="received"><day>30</day><month>9</month><year>2020</year></date><date date-type="accepted"><day>16</day><month>2</month><year>2021</year></date></history><permissions><copyright-statement>© 2021 The Author(s)</copyright-statement><copyright-year>2021</copyright-year><license license-type="cc-by" xlink:href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" xlink:type="simple"><license-p>
                  <graphic content-type="online" orientation="portrait" position="float" xlink:href="https://cfn-live-content-bucket-iop-org.s3.amazonaws.com/journals/1475-7516/2021/04/021/1/ccby.gif?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAYDKQL6LTV7YY2HIK&amp;Expires=1618574446&amp;Signature=kuPGowCYfgIHXBnNSAitpZ%2FIC5c%3D" xlink:type="simple"/>Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of Sissa Medialab. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0" xlink:type="simple">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence</ext-link>. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.</license-p></license></permissions><self-uri content-type="pdf" xlink:href="https://cfn-live-content-bucket-iop-org.s3.amazonaws.com/journals/1475-7516/2021/04/021/1/jcap_2021_04_021.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAYDKQL6LTV7YY2HIK&amp;Expires=1618574446&amp;Signature=vTp6z%2BmBr3VSBaRQNy7yT8fWgGw%3D" xlink:type="simple"/><abstract><title>Abstract</title><p>The unitarity of time evolution, or colloquially the conservation of probability, sits at the heart of our descriptions of fundamental interactions via quantum field theory. The implications of unitarity for scattering amplitudes are well understood, for example through the optical theorem and cutting rules. In contrast, the implications for in-in correlators in curved spacetime and the associated wavefunction of the universe, which are measured by cosmological surveys, are much less transparent. For fields of any mass in de Sitter spacetime with a Bunch-Davies vacuum and general local interactions, which need not be invariant under de Sitter isometries, we show that unitarity implies an infinite set of relations among the coefficients ψ<sub>
                  <italic toggle="yes">n</italic>
               </sub> of the wavefunction of the universe with n fields, which we name Cosmological Optical Theorem. For contact diagrams, our result dictates the analytic structure of ψ<sub>
                  <italic toggle="yes">n</italic>
               </sub> and strongly constrains its form. For example, any correlator with an odd number of conformally-coupled scalar fields and any number of massless scalar fields must vanish. For four-point exchange diagrams, the Cosmological Optical Theorem yields a simple and powerful relation between ψ<sub>3</sub> and ψ<sub>4</sub>, or equivalently between the bispectrum and trispectrum. As explicit checks of this relation, we discuss the trispectrum in single-field inflation from graviton exchange and self-interactions. Moreover, we provide a detailed derivation of the relation between the total-energy pole of cosmological correlators and flat-space amplitudes. We provide analogous formulae for sub-diagram singularities. Our results constitute a new, powerful tool to bootstrap cosmological correlators.</p></abstract><kwd-group kwd-group-type="author"><kwd>inflation</kwd><kwd>particle physics - cosmology connection</kwd><kwd>physics of the early universe</kwd><kwd>quantum cosmology</kwd></kwd-group><counts><page-count count="54"/></counts><custom-meta-group><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>arxivppt</meta-name><meta-value>2009.02898</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-group></article-meta></front></article>