Related papers: Stochastic inflation as an open quantum system II:…
Understanding stochastic inflation, and in particular the systematic computation of controlled corrections from first principles, remains an important open problem. In this work, we address this problem from two complementary perspectives.…
We reinterpret Starobinsky's stochastic inflation as an open quantum system, where short-wavelength modes act as the environment for long-wavelength modes. Using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism, we systematically trace out the environment…
In our quest to understand the generation of cosmological perturbations, we face two serious obstacles: we do not have direct information about the environment experienced by primordial perturbations during inflation, and our observables…
An appealing feature of inflationary cosmology is the presence of a phase-space attractor, "slow roll", which washes out the dependence on initial field velocities. We investigate the robustness of this property under backreaction from…
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 work we generalize a previously developed semiclassical approach to inflation, devoted to the analysis of the effective dynamics of coarse-grained fields, which are essential to the stochastic approach to inflation. We consider…
The stochastic inflation program is a framework for understanding the dynamics of a quantum scalar field driving an inflationary phase. Though widely used and accepted, there have over recent years been serious criticisms of this theory. In…
Stochastic inflation is an effective theory describing the super-Hubble, coarse-grained, scalar fields driving inflation, by a set of Langevin equations. We previously highlighted the difficulty of deriving a theory of stochastic inflation…
The stochastic approach aims at describing the long-wavelength part of quantum fields during inflation by a classical stochastic theory. It is usually formulated in terms of Langevin equations, giving rise to a Fokker-Planck equation for…
The non-linear dynamics of long-wavelength cosmological fluctuations may be phrased in terms of an effective classical, but stochastic evolution equation. The stochastic noise represents short-wavelength modes that continually redshift into…
When energy is not conserved, imprints of new physics on observable cosmology might not follow the rules of local effective actions. By capturing dissipative and diffusive effects, open effective field theories account for the possibly…
The stochastic effective theory approach, often called stochastic inflation, is widely used in cosmology to describe scalar field dynamics during inflation. The existing formulations are, however, more qualitative than quantitative because…
We revisit the Lagrangian formulation of stochastic inflation, where the path-integral approach is employed to derive the Langevin equation governing the dynamics of long-wavelength fields, in contrast to the standard method where the…
During inflation explicit perturbative computations of quantum field theories which contain massless, non-conformal fields exhibit secular effects that grow as powers of the logarithm of the inflationary scale factor. Starobinskii's…
We reconsider the dynamics of stochastic or thermal tunneling in theories like Dirac-Born-Infeld inflation that have non-minimal kinetic terms and, as a result, strongly non-Gaussian perturbations. We first describe a local description of…
A linear open quantum system consisting of a harmonic oscillator linearly coupled to an infinite set of independent harmonic oscillators is considered; these oscillators have a general spectral density function and are initially in a…
In the framework of Soft de Sitter Effective Theory (SdSET), the Fokker-Planck equation for the late-time dynamics of the massless minimally coupled scalar field and its extension to the Kramers-Moyal equation are obtained from operator…
In this paper a quantum mechanical phase space picture is constructed for coarse-grained free quantum fields in an inflationary Universe. The appropriate stochastic quantum Liouville equation is derived. Explicit solutions for the phase…
We analyze the flow into inflation for generic "single-clock" systems, by combining an effective field theory approach with a dynamical-systems analysis. In this approach, we construct an expansion for the potential-like term in the…
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…