Chris Ripken: De Sitter scattering amplitudes in the Born approximation

A basic calculation in QFT is the construction of the Yukawa potential from a tree-level scattering amplitude. In the massless limit, this reproduces the 1/r potential. For gravity, scattering mediated by a massless graviton is thus consistent with the Newtonian potential. In de Sitter spacetime, the cosmological constant gives rise to a mass-like term in the graviton propagator. This raises the question what the classical potential looks like when taking into account curvature effects. In this talk, I will introduce an operator-based formalism to compute scattering amplitudes in curved spacetime, and I will show how to construct the Newtonian potential in a dS background. Remarkably, the potential gives rise to an additional repulsive force, and encodes the de Sitter horizon in a novel and non-trivial way.