It has been shown that the primordial perturbations sourced by inflation are driven to classicality by unitary evolution alone. However, their coupling with the environment such as photons and subsequent decoherence renders the cosmological correlations quantum, losing primordial information in the process. We argue that the quantumness of the resulting cosmological correlations is given by quantum discord, which captures nonclassical behavior beyond quantum entanglement. By considering the environment as a quantum channel in which primordial information contained in the perturbations is transmitted to us, we can then ask how much of this information is inaccessible. We show that this amount of information is given by the discord of the joint primordial perturbations-environment system. To illustrate these points, we model the joint system as a mixed bimodal Gaussian state, and show that quantum discord is dependent on the basis which decoherence occurs.
It has been shown that the primordial perturbations sourced by inflation are driven to classicality by unitary evolution alone. However, their coupling with the environment such as photons and subsequent decoherence renders the cosmological correlations quantum, losing primordial information in the process. We argue that the quantumness of the resulting cosmological correlations is given by quantum discord, which captures nonclassical behavior beyond quantum entanglement. By considering the environment as a quantum channel in which primordial information contained in the perturbations is transmitted to us, we can then ask how much of this information is inaccessible. We show that this amount of information is given by the discord of the joint primordial perturbations-environment system. To illustrate these points, we model the joint system as a mixed bimodal Gaussian state, and show that quantum discord is dependent on the basis which decoherence occurs.
Abstract In quantum information theory, quantum discord has been proposed as a tool to characterise the presence of “quantum correlations” between the subparts of a given system. Whether a system behaves quantum-mechanically or classically is believed to be impacted by the phenomenon of decoherence, which originates from the unavoidable interaction between this system and an environment. Generically, decoherence is associated with a decrease of the state purity, i.e. a transition from a pure to a mixed state. In this paper, we investigate how quantum discord is modified by this quantum-to-classical transition. This study is carried out on systems described by quadratic Hamiltonians and Gaussian states, with generalised squeezing parameters. A generic parametrisation is also introduced to describe the way the system is partitioned into two subsystems. We find that the evolution of quantum discord in presence of an environment is a competition between the growth of the squeezing amplitude and the decrease of the state purity. In phase space, this corresponds to whether the semi-minor axis of the Wigner ellipse increases or decreases, which has a clear geometrical interpretation. Finally, these considerations are applied to primordial cosmological perturbations, thus allowing us to investigate how large-scale structures in our universe, which are believed to arise from quantum fluctuations, can exhibit classical properties.
We investigate the quantumness of primordial cosmological fluctuations and its detectability. The quantum discord of inflationary perturbations is calculated for an arbitrary splitting of the system, and shown to be very large on super-Hubble scales. This entails the presence of large quantum correlations, due to the entangled production of particles with opposite momentums during inflation. To determine how this is reflected at the observational level, we study whether quantum correlators can be reproduced by a nondiscordant state, i.e. a state with vanishing discord that contains classical correlations only. We demonstrate that this can be done for the power spectrum, the price to pay being twofold: first, large errors in other two-point correlation functions that cannot however be detected since they are hidden in the decaying mode; second, the presence of intrinsic non-Gaussianity, the detectability of which remains to be determined but which could possibly rule out a nondiscordant description of the cosmic microwave background. If one abandons the idea that perturbations should be modeled by quantum mechanics and wants to use a classical stochastic formalism instead, we show that any two-point correlators on super-Hubble scales can be exactly reproduced regardless of the squeezing of the system. The latter becomes important only for higher order correlation functions that can be accurately reproduced only in the strong squeezing regime.
We examine environmental decoherence of cosmological perturbations in order to study the quantum-to-classical transition and the impact of noise on entanglement during inflation. Given an explicit interaction between the system and environment, we derive a quantum master equation for the reduced density matrix of perturbations, drawing parallels with quantum Brownian motion, where we see the emergence of fluctuation and dissipation terms. Although the master equation is not in Lindblad form, we see how typical solutions exhibit positivity on super-horizon scales, leading to a physically meaningful density matrix. This allows us to write down a Langevin equation with stochastic noise for the classical trajectories which emerge from the quantum system on super-horizon scales. In particular, we find that environmental decoherence increases in strength as modes exit the horizon, with the growth driven essentially by white noise coming from local contributions to environmental correlations. Finally, we use our master equation to quantify the strength of quantum correlations as captured by discord. We show that environmental interactions have a tendency to decrease the size of the discord and that these effects are determined by the relative strength of the expansion rate and interaction rate of the environment. We interpret this in terms of the competing effects of particle creation versus environmental fluctuations, which tend to increase and decrease the discord respectively.
We investigate how interactions affect the quantum state of scalar perturbations during inflation and the quantum correlations they may exhibit. Focusing on the case of scalar perturbations in single-field inflation, we model interactions using a Lindblad equation with a non-unitary contribution quadratic in the scalar perturbations, and of parametrisable amplitude and time dependence. We compute the quantum state of these interacting perturbations, which is fully described by its purity and squeezing parameters. First, we show that, in most of the parameter space, not only the purity but also the squeezing parameter is significantly reduced by interactions. Second, we show that this de-squeezing induced by the interactions, on top of the purity loss, causes a further suppression of quantum correlations. We thus emphasise that the quantum or classical character of the correlations exhibited by the perturbations cannot be correctly determined by computing the effect of interactions on the purity alone. Since the phenomenological framework adopted in this paper encompasses a wide class of possible interactions, our results provide general insights into the nature of decoherence processes in primordial fluctuations.
Quantum correlations beyond quantum entanglement represent vital resources in quantum information processing as well as in quantum computation. In fact, both quantum entanglement and quantum correlation are the same when the quantum system is described by pure states. However, this is not exactly the case when general mixed states are considered. In order to clarify this, a simple model has been proposed for the production and quantification of these quantum correlations between two mechanical resonators that are macroscopic in two Fabry–Pérot cavities optomechanical coupled by the photon hopping process. In this model, we analyze and investigate the quantification of the quantum correlation beyond the entanglement between the mechanical modes. We determine the global covariance matrix of the model from which we derive the expression of the entropy of formation ([Formula: see text]) as well as the Gaussian quantum discord ([Formula: see text]), which quantify the amount of quantum entanglement and quantum correlations, respectively. The analysis based on these two quantum correlations quantifiers shows that quantum discord is more appropriate to characterize the quantum correlations between the mechanical modes in an optomechanical quantum system in the presence of robust photon hopping.
The total correlation in a bipartite quantum system is measured by the quantum mutual information I, which consists of quantum discord and classical correlation. However, recent results in quantum information show that coherence, which is a part of total correlation, is more general and more fundamental. The role of coherence in quantum resource theory is worthwhile to investigate. We first study the relationship between quantum discord and coherence by decreasing the difference between them. Then, we consider the dynamics of quantum discord, classical correlation, and quantum coherence under incoherent quantum channels. It is found that coherence indicates the behavior of quantum discord (classical correlation) for times t<t, and indicates the behavior of classical correlation (quantum discord) for times t>t. Moreover, the coherence freeze and decay characterize the quantum discord and classical correlation freeze and decay, respectively.