170 citations · 439 across the 19 of their papers we have counts for
7 papers · 1 filter
An Open Effective Field Theory for light in a medium
Santiago Agui Salcedo, Thomas Colas, Enrico Pajer
In many scenarios of interest, a quantum system interacts with an unknown environment, necessitating the use of open quantum system methods to capture dissipative effects and envir…
Does decoherence violate decoupling?
C. P. Burgess, Thomas Colas, R. Holman +1
Recent calculations in both flat and de Sitter spacetimes have highlighted a tension between the decoupling of high-energy physics from low-energy degrees of freedom and the expect…
In-in formalism for the entropy of quantum fields in curved spacetimes
Thomas Colas, Julien Grain, Greg Kaplanek +1
We show how to compute the purity and entanglement entropy for quantum fields in a systematic perturbative expansion. To that end, we generalize the in-in formalism to non-unitary…
Open Effective Field Theories for cosmology
Thomas Colas
When energy is not conserved, imprints of new physics on observable cosmology might not follow the rules of local effective actions. By capturing dissipative and diffusive effects,…
The Open Effective Field Theory of Inflation
Santiago Agui Salcedo, Thomas Colas, Enrico Pajer
In our quest to understand the generation of cosmological perturbations, we face two serious obstacles: we do not have direct information about the environment experienced by primo…
Cosmic Purity Lost: Perturbative and Resummed Late-Time Inflationary Decoherence
C. P. Burgess, Thomas Colas, R. Holman +2
We compute the rate with which unobserved fields decohere other fields to which they couple, both in flat space and in de Sitter space, for spectator scalar fields prepared in thei…
Decoherence out of fire: Purity loss in expanding and contracting universes
Thomas Colas, Claudia de Rham, Greg Kaplanek
We investigate quantum decoherence in a class of models which interpolates between expanding (inflation) and contracting (ekpyrosis) scenarios. For the cases which result in a scal…