An analytic regularisation scheme on curved space-times with applications to cosmological space-times

Abstract

We develop a renormalisation scheme for time-ordered products in interacting field theories on curved space-times that consists of an analytic regularisation of Feynman amplitudes and a minimal subtraction of the resulting pole parts. This scheme is directly applicable to space-times with Lorentzian signature, manifestly generally covariant, invariant under any space-time isometries present, and constructed to all orders in perturbation theory. Moreover, the scheme correctly captures the nongeometric state-dependent contribution of Feynman amplitudes, and it is well suited for practical computations. To illustrate this last point, we compute explicit examples on a generic curved space-time and demonstrate how momentum space computations in cosmological space-times can be performed in our scheme. In this work, we discuss only scalar fields in four space-time dimensions, but we argue that the renormalisation scheme can be directly generalised to other space-time dimensions and field theories with higher spin as well as to theories with local gauge invariance.