Cosmic Purity Lost: Perturbative and Resummed Late-Time Inflationary Decoherence
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| author | Burgess, C. P. Colas, Thomas Holman, R. Kaplanek, Greg Vennin, Vincent |
| author_facet | Burgess, C. P. Colas, Thomas Holman, R. Kaplanek, Greg Vennin, Vincent |
| contents | 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 their standard adiabatic vacuum. The process is very efficient in de Sitter space once the modes in question pass outside the Hubble scale, displaying the tell-tale phenomenon of secular growth that indicates the breakdown of perturbative methods on a time scale parameterically long compared with the Hubble time. We show how to match the perturbative evolution valid at early times onto a late-time Lindblad evolution whose domain of validity extends to much later times, thereby allowing a reliable resummation of the perturbative result beyond the perturbative regime. Super-Hubble modes turn out to be dominantly decohered by unobserved modes that are themselves also super-Hubble. Although our calculation is done for spectator fields, if applied to curvature perturbations during inflation our observations here could close a potential loophole in recent calculations of the late-time purity of the observable primordial fluctuations. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_12240 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Cosmic Purity Lost: Perturbative and Resummed Late-Time Inflationary Decoherence Burgess, C. P. Colas, Thomas Holman, R. Kaplanek, Greg Vennin, Vincent General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory 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 their standard adiabatic vacuum. The process is very efficient in de Sitter space once the modes in question pass outside the Hubble scale, displaying the tell-tale phenomenon of secular growth that indicates the breakdown of perturbative methods on a time scale parameterically long compared with the Hubble time. We show how to match the perturbative evolution valid at early times onto a late-time Lindblad evolution whose domain of validity extends to much later times, thereby allowing a reliable resummation of the perturbative result beyond the perturbative regime. Super-Hubble modes turn out to be dominantly decohered by unobserved modes that are themselves also super-Hubble. Although our calculation is done for spectator fields, if applied to curvature perturbations during inflation our observations here could close a potential loophole in recent calculations of the late-time purity of the observable primordial fluctuations. |
| title | Cosmic Purity Lost: Perturbative and Resummed Late-Time Inflationary Decoherence |
| topic | General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12240 |