Opacity from Loops in AdS

We investigate how quantum dynamics affects the propagation of a scalar field in Lorentzian AdS. We work in momentum space, in which the propagator admits two spectral representations (denoted “conformal” and “momentum”) in addition to a closed-form one, and all have a simple split structure. Focusing on scalar bubbles, we compute the imaginary part of the self-energy ImΠ in the three representations, which involves the evaluation of seemingly very different objects. We explicitly prove their equivalence in any dimension, and derive some elementary and asymptotic properties of ImΠ.