Cosmological Consequences of Initial State Entanglement

Abstract

We explore the cosmological consequences of having the fluctuations of the inflaton field entangled with those of another scalar, within the context of a toy model consisting of non-interacting, minimally coupled scalars in a fixed de Sitter background. We find that despite the lack of interactions in the Lagrangian, the initial state entanglement modifies the mode equation for the inflaton fluctuations and thus can induce changes in cosmological observables. These effects are examined for a variety of choices of masses and we find that they can be consistent with the requirement that the back reaction of the modified state not affect the inflationary phase while still giving rise to observable effects in the power spectrum. Our results suggest that more realistic extensions of the ideas explored here beyond the simple toy model may lead to interesting observable effects.

17 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Observational Signatures and Non-Gaussianities of General Single Field Inflation
• Enhanced Non-Gaussianity from Excited Initial States
• On the consistency relation of the 3-point function in single field inflation
• Impact of quantum entanglement on spectrum of cosmological fluctuations
• The renormalization of the energy-momentum tensor for an effective initial state

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Quantum discord in de Sitter space
• Infinite violation of Bell inequalities in inflation
• Entanglement negativity in the multiverse
• Non-Gaussianity from Entanglement During Inflation
• Generating Entangled Inflationary Quantum States