Decoherence Functional and Inhomogeneities in the Early Universe

Abstract

We investigate the quantum to classical transition of small inhomogeneous fluctuations in the early Universe using the decoherence functional of Gell-Mann and Hartle. We study two types of coarse graining; one due to coarse graining the value of the scalar field and the other due to summing over an environment. We compare the results with a previous study using an environment and the off-diagonal rule proposed by Zurek. We show that the two methods give different results.

15 pages in plain tex

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Semiclassicality and Decoherence of Cosmological Perturbations
• Noise and Fluctuations in Semiclassical Gravity
• Quantum Fluctuations, Decoherence of the Mean Field, and Structure Formation in the Early Universe
• On the quantum origin of the seeds of cosmic structure
• Quantum Brownian Motion in a Bath of Parametric Oscillators: A model for system-field interactions
• Shortcomings in the Understanding of Why Cosmological Perturbations Look Classical
• A Fluctuation-Dissipation Relation for Semiclassical Cosmology
• CSL Wave Function Collapse Model as a Mechanism for the Emergence of Cosmological Asymmetries in Inflation
• A Review of the Decoherent Histories Approach to Quantum Mechanics
• The Coherent State Representation of Quantum Fluctuations in the Early Universe
• Phenomenological analysis of quantum collapse as source of the seeds of cosmic structure
• Phase-Space Decoherence: a comparison between Consistent Histories and Environment Induced Superselection
• Quantum origin of the primordial fluctuation spectrum and its statistics
• The collapse of the wave function in the joint metric-matter quantization for inflation
• The Seeds of Cosmic structure as a door to New Physics
• Chaos, decoherence and quantum cosmology
• Classicalization of Quantum Fluctuations at the Planck Scale in the R_h=ct Universe
• Perspectives on Quantum Gravity Phenomenology
• Cosmological Bell Tests with Decoherence Effects
• A signature of quantum gravity at the source of the seeds of cosmic structure?
• A window to quantum gravity phenomena in the emergence of the seeds of cosmic structure