Renormalizing an initial state

• DOI: 10.1007/jhep10(2014)124
• Publication Date: 2014-10-23T11:06:02Z
• Authors: Hael Collins; R. Holman; Tereza Vardanyan
• Keywords: High Energy Physics - Theory; Nuclear and High Energy Physics; Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); FOS: Physical sciences; 20399 Classical Physics not elsewhere classified; 01 natural sciences; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); 0103 physical sciences; Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

15 pages, no figures<br/>The intricate machinery of perturbative quantum field theory has largely been devoted to the 'dynamical' side of the theory: simple states are evolved in complicated ways. This article begins to address this lopsided treatment. Although it is rarely possible to solve for the eigenstates of an interacting theory exactly, a general state and its evolution can nonetheless be constructed perturbatively in terms of the propagators and structures defined with respect to the free theory. The detailed form of the initial state in this picture is fixed by imposing suitable `renormalization conditions' on the Green's functions. This technique is illustrated with an example drawn from inflation, where the presence of nonrenormalizable operators and where an expansion that naturally couples early times with short distances make the ability to start the theory at a finite initial time especially desirable.<br/>