Decoherence in an Interacting Quantum Field Theory: The Vacuum Case
High Energy Physics - Theory
2015-03-13 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Quantum Physics
Abstract
We apply the decoherence formalism to an interacting scalar field theory. In the spirit of the decoherence literature, we consider a "system field" and an "environment field" that interact via a cubic coupling. We solve for the propagator of the system field, where we include the self-energy corrections due to the interaction with the environment field. In this paper, we consider an environment in the vacuum state (T=0). We show that neglecting inaccessible non-Gaussian correlators increases the entropy of the system as perceived by the observer. Moreover, we consider the effect of a changing mass of the system field in the adiabatic regime, and we find that at late times no additional entropy has been generated.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0910.5733,
title = {Decoherence in an Interacting Quantum Field Theory: The Vacuum Case},
author = {Jurjen F. Koksma and Tomislav Prokopec and Michael G. Schmidt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.5733},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
40 pages, published version