Related papers: Cosmological Decoherence from Thermal Gravitons
We investigate how quantum decoherence influences the tunneling dynamics of quantum fields in cosmological spacetimes. Specifically, we study a scalar field in an asymmetric double-well potential during inflation, coupled to environmental…
Production of gravitational vacuum defects and their contribution to the energy density of our Universe are discussed. These topological microstructures (defects) could be produced in the result of creation of the Universe from "nothing"…
We investigate the cosmological signatures of instantons mediating tunneling between de Sitter minima. For generic potentials the Coleman-de Luccia instanton does not necessarily exist; when it does not, the instanton which contributes to…
We study the decoherence process associated with the scattering of stochastic gravitational waves. We discuss the case of macroscopic systems, such as the planetary motion of the Moon around the Earth, for which gravitational scattering is…
We consider a quantum harmonic oscillator coupled with a graviton bath and discuss the loss of coherence in the matter sector due to the matter-graviton vertex interaction. Working in the quantum-field-theory framework, we obtain a master…
We study the infrared effective theory of gravity that stems from the quantum trace anomaly. Quantum fluctuations of the metric induce running of the cosmological constant and the Newton constant at cosmological scales. By imposing the…
There is mounting theoretical evidence that black hole horizons induce decoherence on a quantum system, say a particle, put in a superposition of locations, with the decoherence functional, evaluated after closure of the superposition,…
We discuss recent experimental evidence of decoherence in a laboratory mesoscopic system in a cavity, from which we draw analogies with the decoherence that we argue is induced by microscopic quantum-gravity fluctuations in the space-time…
General Relativity receives quantum corrections relevant at macroscopic distance scales and near event horizons. These arise from the conformal scalar degrees of freedom in the extended effective field theory of gravity generated by the…
Recently, a static gravitational field, such as that of the Earth, was proposed as a new source of decoherence [1]. We study the conditions under which it becomes the dominant decoherence effect in typical interferometric experiments. The…
We study the false vacuum decay of a single scalar field $\phi$ coupled to gravity described by the Coleman-de Luccia (CdL) instanton. We show that it is possible to numerically calculate the bounce factor, which is related to the CdL…
I point out that the usual Coleman-de Luccia analysis of tunnelling via instantons between perturbatively stable minima using the thin-wall approximation misses one of the effects of gravitational backreaction on the on-shell action and…
It is shown that the classical gravitational waves of super-horizon wavelengths are able to form the de Sitter accelerated expansion of the empty (with no matter fields) Universe. The contemporary Universe is about 70% empty and…
We argue that a scalar field in de Sitter spacetime should feel explicit thermal effects associated with its curvature. Starting from the Bunch-Davies vacuum and a scalar field with small mass compared to the de Sitter curvature, we use the…
Decoherence in quantum cosmology is shown to occur naturally in the presence of induced geometric gauge interactions associated with particle production.A new 'gauge '-variant form of the semiclassical Einstein equations is also presented…
Recently, it has been shown that a quantum system held in spatial superposition and then eventually recombined does experience decoherence from black hole horizons, at a level increasing linearly with the time the superposition has been…
We discuss how to extract information about the cosmological constant from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, considered as an eigenvalue of a Sturm-Liouville problem in a generic spherically symmetric background. The equation is approximated to…
The discovery of cosmic acceleration has presented a unique challenge for cosmologists. As observational cosmology forges ahead, theorists have struggled to make sense of a standard model that requires extreme fine tuning. This challenge is…
Despite the fact that we have some proposals for the quantum theory of gravity like string theory or loop quantum gravity, we do not have any experimental evidence supporting any of these theories. Actually, we do not have experimental…
In this thesis, we investigate quantum vacuum effects in the presence of gravitational fields. After discussing the general theory of vacuum effects in strong fields we apply it to the relevant issue of the interaction of the quantum vacuum…