Decoherence in the cosmic background radiation
Abstract
In this paper we analyze the possibility of detecting nontrivial quantum phenomena in observations of the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation (CBR), for example, if the Universe could be found in a coherent superposition of two states corresponding to different CBR temperatures. Such observations are sensitive to scalar primordial fluctuations but insensitive to tensor fluctuations, which are therefore converted into an environment for the former. Even for a free inflaton field minimally coupled to gravity, scalar-tensor interactions induce enough decoherence among histories of the scalar fluctuations as to render them classical under any realistic probe of their amplitudes.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1103.0188,
title = {Decoherence in the cosmic background radiation},
author = {Mariano Franco and Esteban Calzetta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.0188},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
15 pages, accepted to be published in Classical and Quantum Gravity