Pointer states for primordial fluctuations in inflationary cosmology
By Claus Kiefer, I. Lohmar, D. Polarski, A. Starobinsky. 2006
153 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Primordial fluctuations in inflationary cosmology acquire classical properties through decoherence when their wavelengths become larger than the Hubble scale. Although decoherence is effective, it is not complete, so a significant part of primordial correlations remains up to the present moment. We address the issue of the pointer states which provide a classical basis for the fluctuations with respect to the influence by an environment (other fields). Applying methods from the quantum theory of open systems (the Lindblad equation), we show that this basis is given by narrow Gaussians that approximate eigenstates of field amplitudes. We calculate both the von Neumann and linear entropy of the fluctuations. Their ratio to the maximal entropy per field mode defines a degree of partial decoherence in the entropy sense. We also determine the time of partial decoherence making the Wigner function positive everywhere which, for super-Hubble modes during inflation, is virtually independent of coupling to the environment and is only slightly larger than the Hubble time. On the other hand, assuming a representative environment (a photon bath), the decoherence time for sub-Hubble modes is finite only if some real dissipation exists.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14b5c74fcc688b196551f0b39363c10ee3b09785
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Citations in the corpus
- EFT beyond the horizon: stochastic inflation and how primordial quantum fluctuations go classical (2014, methodology): “See also [35] for an application of the Lindblad equation to the problem we are considering.”