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arXiv:1205.1841 · Classical and Quantum Gravity

Chaos, decoherence and quantum cosmology

Esteban Calzetta

Published Jun 19, 2012• 20 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In this topical review we discuss the connections between chaos, decoherence and quantum cosmology.We understand chaos as classical chaos in systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom, decoherence as environment induced decoherence and quantum cosmology as the theory of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation or else the consistent history formulation thereof, first in mini super spaces and later through its extension to midi super spaces.The overall conclusion is that consideration of decoherence is necessary (and probably sufficient) to sustain an interpretation of quantum cosmology based on the wavefunction of the Universe adopting a Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin form for large Universes, but a definitive account of the semiclassical transition in classically chaotic cosmological models is not available in the literature yet.

DOI
10.1088/0264-9381/29/14/143001

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In this topical review we discuss the connections between chaos, decoherence and quantum cosmology.We understand chaos as classical chaos in systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom, decoherence as environment induced decoherence and quantum cosmology as the theory of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation or else the consistent history formulation thereof, first in mini super spaces and later through its extension to midi super spaces.The overall conclusion is that consideration of decoherence is necessary (and probably sufficient) to sustain an interpretation of quantum cosmology based on the wavefunction of the Universe adopting a Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin form for large Universes, but a definitive account of the semiclassical transition in classically chaotic cosmological models is not available in the literature yet.
In this work the decoherence formalism of quantum mechanics is explored and applied to a number of interesting problems in quantum physics. The boundary between quantum and classical physics is examined, and demonstration made that quantum histories corresponding to classical equations of motion become more probable for a broad class of models, including linear and nonlinear models of Brownian motion. The link between noise, dissipation, and decoherence is studied. This work is then applied to systems which classically exhibit dissipative chaotic dynamics. A theory is explicated for treating these systems, and the ideas are applied to a particular model of the forced, damped Duffing oscillator, which is chaotic for certain parameter values. Differences between classical and quantum chaos are examined, particularly differences arising in the structure of fractal strange attractors, and the conceptual difficulties in framing standard notions of chaos in a quantum system. A brief discussion of previous work on quantum chaos is included, and the differences between Hamiltonian and dissipative chaos pointed out; a somewhat different interpretation of quantum chaos from the standard one is suggested. A class of histories for quantum systems, in phase space rather than configuration space, is studied. Different ways of representing projections in phase space are discussed, and expressions for the probability of phase space histories are derived; conditions for such histories to decohere are also estimated in the semiclassical limit.
We consider the problem of extracting physical predictions from the wave function of the universe in quantum cosmological models. We state the features of quantum cosmology an interpretational scheme should confront. We discuss the Everett interpretation, and extensions of it, and their application to quantum cosmology. We review the steps that are normally taken in the process of extracting predictions from solutions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for quantum cosmological models. Some difficulties and their possible resolution are discussed. We conclude that the usual wave function-based approach admits at best a rather heuristic interpretation, although it may in the future be justified by appeal to the decoherent histories approach.
Inspired by the central equation of canonical quantum gravity, the timeless Wheeler-DeWitt equation, we investigate timeless properties for quantum cosmological models. In particular we are interested in the following question: What is the probability of the system entering certain regions of its configuration space without reference to time at all? For the classical case this is a property of the entire system trajectories and can be formulated using a phase space probability distribution 1. In the quantum case we propose and investigate a probability which we obtain by adapting the decoherent histories approach to quantum theory 2 to the timeless case and by using the induced inner product on the physical state space of quantum cosmological models 3. For the example of the Klein-Gordon equation we have investigated the case of space–like surfaces and our results agree with the standard operator methods 4. For a more general model we consider a semiclassical approximation as well as the effect of an environment 1. When the histories are decoherent, the probabilities approximately coincide with the classical case, with the phase space probability distribution replaced by the Wigner function of the quantum state. The influence functional of the environment respects the reparametrization invariance of the quantum cosmological Wheeler-DeWitt equation.
We study, within a toy model, how a thermal bath of cosmological perturbations can decohere the minisuperspace degrees of freedom of the universe, treating the perturbations as an environment in the framework of open quantum systems. Instead of tracing out the perturbations from a semiclassical ansatz for the total wave function, as in earlier approaches, we incorporate their backreaction on the background through an effective second-order coupling and derive a master equation. The model describes a spatially flat semiclassical universe during slow-roll inflation with a dust clock field, while scalar cosmological perturbations in a phenomenologically assumed thermal state constitute the environment. The master equation is non-Markovian, since the bath correlation functions do not decay in time. Within this framework, we find that, for a representative set of parameter estimates, the characteristic decoherence timescale corresponding to the thermal contribution can be shorter than the Hubble timescale. In addition, we address the question of whether the pointer-state structure induced by the decoherence in such a framework could provide a criterion for the choice of semiclassical states in quantum cosmology.
Two basic properties defining classical behavior are "decoherence" and "correlations between co-ordinates and momenta." We study how the correlations that define the semiclassical decohering histories of the relevant cosmological variables are affected by the interaction with an environment formed by unobserved ("irrelevant") degrees of freedom. For some quantum cosmological models we analyze under what conditions the semiclassical coarse-grained histories obey the so-called semiclassical Einstein's equations (i.e., ${G}_{\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\nu}}=\ensuremath{\kappa}〈{T}_{\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\nu}}〉$). These equations are shown to be valid only as a description of adiabatic regions of histories for which the interference effects have been suppressed. We also discuss the problem related to the existence of divergences in the decoherence factor of various quantum cosmological models.
When quantum mechanics was developed in the '20s of the last century another revolution in physics was just starting. It began with the discovery that the universe is expanding. For a long time quantum mechanics and cosmology developed independently of one another. Yet the very discovery of the expansion would eventually draw the two subjects together because it implied the big bang where quantum mechanics wasimportant for cosmology and for understanding and predicting our observations of the universe today. Textbook (Copenhagen) formulations of quantum mechanics are inadequate for cosmology for at least four reasons: 1) They predict the outcomes of measurements made by observers. But in the very early universe no measurements were being made and no observers were around to make them. 2) Observers were outside of the system being measured. But we are interested in a theory of the whole universe where everything, including observers, are inside. 3) Copenhagen quantum mechanics could not retrodict the past. But retrodicting the past to understand how the universe began is the main task of cosmology. 4) Copenhagen quantum mechanics required a fixed classical spacetime geometry not least to give meaning to the time in the Schrödinger equation. But in the very early universe spacetime is fluctuating quantum mechanically (quantum gravity) and without definite value. A formulation of quantum mechanics general enough for cosmology was started by Everett and developed by many. That effort has given us a more general framework that is adequate for cosmology --- decoherent (or consistent) histories quantum theory in the context of semiclassical quantum gravity. Copenhagen quantum theory is an approximation to this more general quantum framework that is appropriate for measurement situations. We discuss whether further generalization may still be required.