Decoherence Can Relax Cosmic Acceleration

Abstract

In this work we investigate the semi-classical backreaction for a quantised conformal scalar field and classical vacuum energy. In contrast to the usual approximation of a closed system, our analysis includes an environmental sector such that a quantum-to-classical transition can take place. We show that when the system decoheres into a mixed state with particle number as the classical observable de Sitter space is destabilized, which is observable as a gradually decreasing Hubble rate. In particular we show that at late times this mechanism can drive the curvature of the Universe to zero and has an interpretation as the decay of the vacuum energy demonstrating that quantum effects can be relevant for the fate of the Universe.

20 pages. v2: minor rewordings, updated references. v3: expanded discussion, added references, accepted by JCAP. v4: missing trace in (2.5) and (3.22) corrected, references updated

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