A bootstrap approach to cosmology

The correlations that we observe in the distribution of matter and radiation in the universe can be traced back to correlations of inflationary perturbations, opening a window into the Universe’s earliest moments. This thesis explores a new approach to understanding these primordial correlators: the cosmological bootstrap. The strategy is to compute the correlation functions directly on the time slice at the end of inflation, fixing their functional form by demanding them to be compatible with fundamental physical principles like symmetries, locality, and unitarity, and without making explicit reference to time evolution in the inflationary bulk. This method is generating an important amount of theoretical data relevant for future observations, and is providing new insights into the physics of inflation and de Sitter space.