Cosmological correlators in gravitationally constrained de Sitter states

We study cosmological correlators in de Sitter quantum gravity in the limit where $G_N \to 0$. This limit is distinct from a nongravitational QFT because the gravitational constraints still force states and observables to be de Sitter invariant. We show that, in the presence of a heavy background state, it is possible to construct a separate class of state-dependent relational observables whose values approximate QFT correlators in the vacuum. This illustrates a key contrast in quantum gravity — between observables that are microscopically simple and observables whose expectation values in an appropriate background state lead to simple QFT-like correlators.