BRST quantization of cosmological perturbations

BRST quantization is an elegant and powerful method to quantize theories with local symmetries. In this article we study the Hamiltonian BRST quantization of cosmological perturbations in a universe dominated by a scalar field, along with the closely related quantization method of Dirac. We describe how both formalisms apply to perturbations in a time-dependent background, and how expectation values of gauge-invariant operators can be calculated in the in-in formalism. Our analysis focuses mostly on the free theory. By appropriate canonical transformations we simplify and diagonalize the free Hamiltonian. BRST quantization in derivative gauges allows us to dramatically simplify the structure of the propagators, whereas Dirac quantization, which amounts to quantization in synchronous gauge, dispenses with the need to introduce ghosts and preserves the locality of the gaugefixed action.