No intrinsic decoherence of inflationary cosmological perturbations

Abstract

After a brief summary of decoherence and quantum to classical transition in cosmology we focus on the study of quantum decoherence of cosmological perturbations in inflationary universe, that does not rely on any environment. This is what `intrinsic' in the title refers to -- a closed quantum system. The question is, does its quantum perturbations decohere with an inflationary expansion of the universe. A dominant view which had propagated for a quarter of a century asserts yes, based on the belief that the large squeezing of a quantum state after a duration of inflation renders the system effectively classical. This paper debunks this view by identifying the technical fault-lines in its derivations and revealing the pitfalls in its arguments which drew earlier authors to this wrong conclusion. We use a few simple quantum mechanical models to expound where the fallacy originated: The highly squeezed ellipse quadrature in phase space cannot be simplified to a line, and the Wigner function cannot be replaced by a delta function. These amount to taking only the leading order contributions in seeking the semiclassical limit and ignoring the subdominant contributions where quantum features reside. Doing so violates the bounds of the Wigner function, and its wave functions possess negative eigenvalues. Moreover, the Robertson-Schrodinger uncertainty relation for a pure state is violated. For inflationary cosmological perturbations, in addition to these features, entanglement exists between the created pairs. This uniquely quantum feature cannot be easily argued away. Indeed it could be our best hope to retroduce the quantum nature of cosmological perturbations and the trace of an inflaton field. All this point to the fact that a closed quantum system, even when highly squeezed, evolves unitarily without loss of coherence; quantum cosmological perturbations do not by itself decohere.

55 pages, 5 figures

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