Cosmological Constant from Decoherence

Abstract

We address the issue why a cosmological constant (dark energy) possesses a small positive value instead of being zero. Motivated by the cosmic landscape picture, we mimic the dark energy by a scalar field with potential wells and show that other degrees of freedom interacting with it can localize this field by decoherence in one of the wells. Dark energy can then acquire a small positive value. We also show that the additional degrees of freedom enhance the tunneling rate between the wells. The consideration is performed in detail for the case of two wells and then extended to a large number of wells.

39 pages, 2 figures, final version

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• Dark energy from entanglement entropy
• On the Ollivier-Poulin-Zurek definition of objectivity
• Cosmological Decoherence from Thermal Gravitons
• Observational constraints on models of the Universe with time variable Gravitational and Cosmological constants along MOG
• Time dependent action in ${\varphi }^6$ potential
• Decoherence delays false vacuum decay
• Constructing an entangled state in Heisenberg picture for inflationary cosmology
• Quantum fluctuations and semiclassicality in an inflaton-driven evolution
• Interacting Dark Energy and Its Implications for Unified Dark Sector