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Cosmic decoherence: massive fields

Journal of High Energy Physics volume 2016, Article number: 72 (2016) Cite this article

A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv.

Abstract

We study the decoherence of massive fields during inflation based on the Zurek’s density matrix approach. With the cubic interaction between inflaton and massive fields, the reduced density matrix for the massive fields can be calculated in the Schrödinger picture which is related to the variance of the non-Gaussian exponent in the wave functional. The decoherence rate is computed in the one-loop form from functional integration. For heavy fields with \( m\gtrsim \mathcal{O}(H) \), quantum fluctuations will easily stay in the quantum state and decoherence is unlikely. While for light fields with mass smaller than \( \mathcal{O}(H) \), quantum fluctuations are easily decohered within 5 ∼ 10 e-folds after Hubble crossing. Thus heavy fields can play a key role in studying problems involving inflationary quantum information.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, 91125, U.S.A.

    Junyu Liu

  2. School of the Gifted Young, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, China

    Junyu Liu

  3. Department of Physics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Chon-Man Sou & Yi Wang

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  1. Junyu Liu
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Correspondence to Chon-Man Sou.

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ArXiv ePrint: 1608.07909

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Liu, J., Sou, CM. & Wang, Y. Cosmic decoherence: massive fields. J. High Energ. Phys. 2016, 72 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2016)072

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Keywords

  • Cosmology of Theories beyond the SM
  • Models of Quantum Gravity