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Subtleties in decoherence and squeezing of cosmological perturbations

Speakers:
  • Chon Man Sou
    (
    • Tsinghua University
    )

Event description

We revisit the cosmological perturbations in minimal single-field inflation, focusing on subtleties arising from total time derivatives (boundary terms) in their action and the corresponding slow-roll unsuppressed phase in the wave functional. While these total derivatives do not contribute to field correlators, they can significantly influence processes related to momentum-space entanglement, including decoherence and squeezing. We also discuss the necessity of considering such terms from several perspectives: the well-defined variational principle in gravity, the integration-by-parts procedure of cosmological perturbations and the WKB limit of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Finally, we explore these subtleties in a proposed cosmological Bell test utilizing momentum-space entanglement, showing a possible window for Bell violation. References: 2405.07141, 2305.08071 and 2207.04435

Subtleties in decoherence and squeezing of cosmological perturbations

Venue

Higgs Centre Seminar Room, JCMB (Find us on campus maps)
The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics
School of Physics and Astronomy
James Clerk Maxwell Building, 4305
Peter Guthrie Tait Road
Edinburgh
EH9 3FD
UK