Decoherence in the cosmic background radiation

MARIANO FRANCO ; ESTEBAN CALZETTA

CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2011 vol. 28 p. 1 - 13

0264-9381

In this paper, we analyze the possibility of detecting nontrivial quantumphenomena in observations of the temperature anisotropy of the cosmicbackground radiation (CBR), for example, if the Universe could be foundin a coherent superposition of two states corresponding to different CBRtemperatures. Such observations are sensitive to scalar primordial fluctuationsbut insensitive to tensor fluctuations, which are therefore converted into anenvironment for the former. Even for a free inflaton field minimally coupled togravity, scalar?tensor interactions induce enough decoherence among historiesof the scalar fluctuations as to render them classical under any realistic probeof their amplitudes.