Decoherence in the cosmic background radiation
arXiv:1103.0188 · doi:10.1088/0264-9381/28/14/145024
Abstract
In this paper we analyze the possibility of detecting nontrivial quantum phenomena in observations of the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation (CBR), for example, if the Universe could be found in a coherent superposition of two states corresponding to different CBR temperatures. Such observations are sensitive to scalar primordial fluctuations but insensitive to tensor fluctuations, which are therefore converted into an environment for the former. Even for a free inflaton field minimally coupled to gravity, scalar-tensor interactions induce enough decoherence among histories of the scalar fluctuations as to render them classical under any realistic probe of their amplitudes.
15 pages, accepted to be published in Classical and Quantum Gravity
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- Quantum Decoherence During Inflation from Gravitational Nonlinearities
- Entanglement Entropy of Cosmological Perturbations
- Obstructions to Bell CMB Experiments
- Bell violation in the Sky
- Emergence of classical behavior in the early universe
- Chaos, decoherence and quantum cosmology
- Primordial gravitational waves amplification from causal fluids