Related papers: Cosmic Decoherence: Massive Fields
We calculate the reduced density matrix for the inflaton field in a model of chaotic inflation by tracing out degrees of freedom corresponding to various bosonic fields. We find a qualitatively new contribution to the density matrix given…
I present the procedure for integrating out quantum fields whose mass M is well above the Hubble scale H in de Sitter space. The effective interaction and density matrix are explicitly computed for a simple example and are found to be of…
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…
A calculation of the one-mode occupation numbers for vacuum fluctuations of massive fields in De Sitter space shows that their use for the generation of classical density perturbations in inflationary cosmology very much depends on their…
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…
During inflation, the geometry of spacetime is described by a (quasi-)de Sitter phase. Inflationary observables are determined by the underlying (softly broken) de Sitter isometry group SO(1, 4) which acts like a conformal group on R^3:…
We show how the quantum to classical transition of the cosmological fluctuations produced during inflation can be described by means of the influence functional and the master equation. We split the inflaton field into the system-field…
We show how the quantum to classical transition of the cosmological fluctuations produced during inflation can be described by means of the influence functional and the master equation. We split the inflaton field into the system-field…
We study the power spectrum of super-Hubble fluctuations of an inflaton-like scalar field, the "system", coupled to another scalar field, the "environment" during de Sitter inflation. We obtain the reduced density matrix for the inflaton…
I study the gauge-invariant fluctuations of the metric during inflation. In the infrared sector the metric fluctuations can be represented by a coarse-grained field. We can write a Schroedinger equation for the coarse-grained metric…
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…
A Schroedinger picture analysis of time dependent quantum oscillators, in a manner of Guth and Pi, clearly identifies two physical mechanisms for possible decoherence of vacuum fluctuations in early universe: turning of quantum oscillators…
We examine from first principles one of the basic assumptions of modern quantum theories of structure formation in the early universe, i.e., the conditions upon which fluctuations of a quantum field may transmute into classical stochastic…
We derive an uncertainty relation for the energy density and pressure of a quantum scalar field in a time-dependent, homogeneous and isotropic, classical background, which implies the existence of large fluctuations comparable to their…
In the framework of chaotic inflation we study the case of a massive scalar field using a semiclassical approach. We derive the energy density fluctuations in the infrared sector generated by matter field and gauge-invariant metric…
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…
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…
We propose one way to regularize the fluctuations generated during inflation, whose infrared (IR) corrections diverge logarithmically. In the case of a single field inflation model, recently, we proposed one solution to the IR divergence…
The (large-scale) structures we observe in the Universe are classical, but within the inflationary scenario they do originate from quantum fluctuations. This leads to the question: ''How did this quantum-to-classical transition occur?''. A…
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…