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 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.
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 study the environment-induced decoherence of cosmological perturbations in an inflationary background. Splitting our spectrum of perturbations into two distinct sets characterized by their wavelengths (super and sub-Hubble), we identify the long-wavelength modes with our system and the remainder with an environment. We examine the effects of the interactions between our system and the environment. This interaction causes the long-wavelength modes to decohere for realistic values of the coupling and we conclude that interactions due to backreaction are more than sufficient to decohere the bulk of the system within 60 e-foldings of inflation. This is shown explicitly by obtaining an analytic solution to a master equation detailing the evolution of the density matrix of the system.
A quantum master equation describing the stochastic dynamics of a quantum massive system interacting with a quantum gravitational field is useful for the investigation of quantum gravitational and quantum informational issues such as the quantum nature of gravity, gravity-induced entanglement and gravitational decoherence. Studies of the decoherence of quantum systems by an electromagnetic field shows that a lower temperature environment is more conducive to successful quantum information processing experiments. Likewise, the quantum nature of (perturbative) gravity is far better revealed at lower temperatures than high, minimizing the corruptive effects of thermal noise. In this work, generalizing earlier results of the Markovian ABH master equation [1,2] which is valid only for high temperatures, we derive a non-Markovian quantum master equation for the reduced density matrix, and the associated Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner distribution function, for the stochastic dynamics of two masses following quantum trajectories, interacting with a graviton field, including the effects of graviton noise, valid for all temperatures. We follow the influence functional approach exemplified in the derivation of the non-Markovian Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation [62,64] for quantum Brownian motion. We find that in the low temperature limit, the off-diagonal elements of the reduced density matrix decrease in time logarithmically for the zero temperature part and quadratically in time for the temperature-dependent part, which is distinctly different from the Markovian case. We end with a summary of our findings and a discussion on how this problem studied here is related to the quantum stochastic equation derived in [77] for gravitational self force studies, and to quantum optomechanics where experimental observation of gravitational decoherence and entanglement may be implemented.
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.
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.
We address the dynamics of entanglement and quantum discord for two noninteracting qubits initially prepared in a maximally entangled state and then subjected to a classical colored noise, i.e., coupled with an external environment characterized by a noise spectrum of the form $1/{f}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$. More specifically, we address systems in which the Gaussian approximation fails, i.e., mere knowledge of the spectrum is not enough to determine the dynamics of quantum correlations. We thus investigate the dynamics for two different configurations of the environment: in the first case, the noise spectrum is due to the interaction of each qubit with a single bistable fluctuator with an undetermined switching rate, whereas in the second case we consider a collection of classical fluctuators with fixed switching rates. In both cases, we found analytical expressions for the time dependence of entanglement and quantum discord, which may also be extended to a collection of fluctuators with random switching rates. The environmental noise is introduced by means of stochastic time-dependent terms in the Hamiltonian, and this allows us to describe the effects of both separate and common environments. We show that the non-Gaussian character of the noise may lead to significant effects, e.g., environments with the same power spectrum, but different configurations give rise to the opposite behavior for quantum correlations. In particular, depending on the characteristics of the environmental noise considered, both entanglement and discord display either a monotonic decay or the phenomena of sudden death and revivals. Our results show that the microscopic structure of the environment, in addition to its noise spectrum, is relevant for the dynamics of quantum correlations and may be a valid starting point for the engineering of non-Gaussian colored environments.