Renormalization group inspired autonomous equations for secular effects in de Sitter space

We develop a method for treating a series of secularly growing terms obtained from quantum perturbative calculations: autonomous first-order differential equations are constructed such that they reproduce this series to the given order. The exact solutions of these equations are free of secular terms and approach a finite limit at late times. This technique is illustrated for the well-known problem of secular growth of correlation functions of a massless scalar field with a quartic self-interaction in de Sitter space. For the expectation value of the product of two fields at coinciding space-time points, we obtain a finite late-time result that is very close to the one following from Starobinsky’s stochastic approach.