Related papers: Cosmic Decoherence: Massive Fields
We present a simple calculation leading to the quantum gravitationally-induced decoherence of a spatial superposition of a massive object in the linear coupling regime. The point of this calculation is to illustrate that the…
The physics of the inflationary universe requires the study of the out of equilibrium evolution of quantum fields in curved spacetime. We present the evolution for both the geometry and the matter (described by the quantum inflaton field)…
The shortcomings of the Standard Big Bang Cosmological Model as well as their resolution in the context of inflationary cosmology are discussed. The inflationary scenario and the subsequent oscillation and decay of the inflaton field are…
A scalar potential coupled to other fields of large disparate masses will exhibit power suppression of the quantum loop corrections from these massive fields. Quintessence fields in the dark energy regime and inflaton fields during…
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 properties of coherence and polarization of light has been the subject of intense investigations and form the basis of many technological applications. These concepts which historically have been treated independently can now be…
We discuss inflation in models with large extra dimensions, driven by a bulk scalar field. The brane inflaton is then a single effective field, obtained from the bulk scalar field by scaling. The self interaction terms of the effective…
The quantum nature of gravity remains an open question in fundamental physics, lacking experimental verification. Gravitational waves (GWs) provide a potential avenue for detecting gravitons, the hypothetical quantum carriers of gravity.…
Transition to the semiclassical behaviour and the decoherence process for inhomogeneous perturbations generated from the vacuum state during an inflationary stage in the early Universe are considered both in the Heisenberg and the…
We provide a description of interacting quantum fields in terms of density matrices for any occupation numbers in Fock space in a momentum basis. As a simple example, we focus on a real scalar field interacting with another real scalar…
We calculate the dissipation rate of a coherently oscillating scalar field in a thermal environment using nonequilibrium quantum field theory and apply it to the reheating stage after cosmic inflation. It is shown that the rate is…
We have studied the grand potential and phase transitions of an inhomogeneous finite volume spherical quark system. First the finite volume effects are considered by applying the multiple reflection expansion method which is an…
We compute the growth of the mean square of quantum fluctuations of test fields with small effective mass during a slowly changing, nearly de Sitter stage which took place in different inflationary models. We consider a minimally coupled…
Real world quantum systems are open to perpetual influence from the wider environment. Quantum gravitational fluctuations provide a most fundamental source of the environmental influence through their universal interactions with all forms…
We study the effect of quantum decoherence on the inflationary cosmological perturbations. This process might imprint specific observational signatures revealing the quantum nature of the inflationary mechanism being related to the…
We study the dynamics of the standard model Higgs field in the inflationary cosmology. Since metastability of our vacuum is indicated by the current experimental data of the Higgs boson and top quark, inflation models with a large Hubble…
We analyze the emergence of classical cosmological spacetimes in quantum cosmology by computing the reduced density matrix for long-wavelength curvature perturbations. Starting from standard Hartle--Hawking and tunneling boundary…
Any one-field inflation is actually realized in a multifield configuration because the inflaton must have couplings with other fields to reheat the universe and is coupled to all other fields at least gravitationally. In all single inflaton…
Pseudo-scalar inflation coupled with U(1) gauge fields through the Chern-Simons term has been extensively studied. However, new physics arising from UV theories may still influence the pseudo-scalar field at low-energy scales, potentially…
It has recently been suggested that a strongly coupled phase of inflation may be described holographically in terms of a weakly coupled quantum field theory (QFT). Here, we explore the possibility that the wave function of an inflationary…