The quantum Fokker-Planck equation of stochastic inflation
High Energy Physics - Theory
2017-12-06 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
We derive the stochastic description of a massless, interacting scalar field in de Sitter space directly from the quantum theory. This is done by showing that the density matrix for the effective theory of the long wavelength fluctuations of the field obeys a quantum version of the Fokker-Planck equation. This equation has a simple connection with the standard Fokker-Planck equation of the classical stochastic theory, which can be generalised to any order in perturbation theory. We illustrate this formalism in detail for the theory of a massless scalar field with a quartic interaction.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.07805,
title = {The quantum Fokker-Planck equation of stochastic inflation},
author = {Hael Collins and Richard Holman and Tereza Vardanyan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07805},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
25 pages, no figures