Related papers: Decoherence due to the Horizon after Inflation
We study the process whereby quantum cosmological perturbations become classical within inflationary cosmology. By setting up a master-equation formulation we show how quantum coherence for super-Hubble modes can be destroyed by their…
In inflationary cosmology all particle states decay as a consequence of the lack of kinematic thresholds. The decay of an initial single particle state yields an \emph{entangled quantum state of the product particles}. We generalize and…
We discuss the possible role of isocurvature perturbations for the quantum decoherence of the curvature perturbation during inflation. We point out that if the inflaton trajectory in field space is curved, the adiabatic mode is generically…
Using the fact that we only observe those modes which exit the Hubble horizon during inflation, one can calculate the entanglement entropy of such long-wavelength perturbations by tracing out unobservable sub-Hubble fluctuations they are…
We study the behaviour of inflationary density perturbations in the vicinity of horizon crossing, using numerical evolution of the relevant mode equations. We explore two specific scenarios. In one, inflation is temporarily ended because a…
We study the entanglement entropy resulting from tracing out local degrees of freedom of a quantum scalar field in an expanding universe. It is known that when field modes become superhorizon during inflation they evolve to increasingly…
We compute the evolution of the entanglement entropy for a massless field within a spherical region throughout the inflationary period and the subsequent era of radiation domination, starting from the Bunch-Davies vacuum. In order to focus…
We study the evironment-induced decoherence of cosmological perturbations in an inflationary background. Splitting our spectrum of perturbations into two distinct sets characterized by their wavelengths (super and sub-Hubble), we identify…
I study a stochastic approach to the recently introduced fresh inflation model for super Hubble scales. I find that the state loses its coherence at the end of the fresh inflationary period as a consequence of the damping of the…
We show that the entropy of cosmological perturbations originating as quantum vacuum fluctuations in the very early universe, including the contribution of the leading nonlinear interactions, can be viewed as momentum space entanglement…
We compute the rate with which super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations are decohered during inflation, by their gravitational interactions with unobserved shorter-wavelength scalar and tensor modes. We do so using Open Effective Field Theory…
We investigate entanglement generation between the sub- and super-Hubble modes of inflaton fluctuations, in the context of particle production from perturbations during inflation. We consider a large-field inflationary scenario where…
Since inflationary perturbations must generically couple to all degrees of freedom present in the early Universe, it is more realistic to view these fluctuations as an open quantum system interacting with an environment. Then, on very…
The end of inflation is connected to the standard cosmological scenario through reheating. During reheating, the inflaton oscillates around the minimum of the potential and thus decays into the daughter particles that populate the Universe…
Slow-roll inflation can become eternal if the quantum variance of the inflaton field around its slowly rolling classical trajectory is converted into a distribution of classical spacetimes inflating at different rates, and if the variance…
The entanglement entropy of a free field in de Sitter space is enhanced by the squeezing of its modes. We show analytically that the expansion induces a term in the entanglement entropy that depends logarithmically on the size of the…
We identify the effective theory describing inflationary super-Hubble scales and show it to be a special case of effective field theories appropriate to open systems. Open systems allow information to be exchanged between the degrees of…
In this paper we study the survival of entanglement of a scalar field state created during inflation. We find that there exist UV-finite subdominant contributions to the entanglement entropy per momentum mode that scale with the number of…
Primordial fluctuations in inflationary cosmology acquire classical properties through decoherence when their wavelengths become larger than the Hubble scale. Although decoherence is effective, it is not complete, so a significant part of…
We analyze the evolution of the perturbations in the inflaton field and metric following the end of inflation. We present accurate analytic approximations for the perturbations, showing that the coherent oscillations of the…