Decoherence Can Relax Cosmic Acceleration: an Example

Abstract

We investigate back reaction in de Sitter space in an approach where only states that are observationally accessible are included in the density matrix. Using the Bunch-Davies vacuum as the initial condition we find for a conformal scalar field and a cosmological constant that tracing over the unobservable states beyond the cosmological horizon leads to a thermal spectrum of particles and that such a configuration is unstable under semi-classical back reaction. It is concluded that this prescription results in an instability of de Sitter space with a gradually increasing horizon size.

11 pages, 2 figures. v2: expanded text, new title and abstract. Results unchanged. v3: version accepted for publication by JCAP, added references

References in corpus (6)

• The Unruh effect and its applications
• De Sitter Space and Eternity
• A Measure of de Sitter Entropy and Eternal Inflation
• Quantum Break-Time of de Sitter
• Massive scalar field evolution in de Sitter
• Decoherence Can Relax Cosmic Acceleration

Cited by in corpus (8)

• De Sitter Stability and Coarse Graining
• Instability of De Sitter Spacetime induced by Quantum Conformal Anomaly
• Eternal inflation and the quantum birth of cosmic structure
• De Sitter Quantum Breaking, Swampland Conjectures and Thermal Strings
• Instability of de Sitter space under thermal radiation in different vacua
• Horizon Feedback Inflation
• Eternal inflation in light of Wheeler-DeWitt equation
• Decoherence and entropy generation in an open quantum scalar-fermion system with Yukawa interaction