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arXiv:1705.07703

Quantum decoherence from entanglement during inflation

Abasalt Rostami, Javad T. Firouzjaee

Published May 22, 2017• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the primary entanglement effect on the decoherence of fields reduced density matrix which are in interaction with another fields or independent mode functions. We show that the primary entanglement has a significant role in decoherence of the system quantum state. We find that the existence of entanglement could couple dynamical equations coming from Schrödinger equation. We show if one wants to see no effect of the entanglement parameter in decoherence then interaction terms in Hamiltonian can not be independent from each other. Generally, including the primary entanglement destroys the independence of the interaction terms. Our results could be generalized to every scalar quantum field theory with a well defined quantization in a given curved space time.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1705.07703

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We investigate quantum entanglement of a scalar field in the inflationary universe. By introducing a bipartite system using a lattice model of scalar field, we apply the separability criterion based on the partial transpose operation and numerically calculate the bipartite entanglement between separate spatial regions. We find that the initial entangled state becomes separable or disentangled when the size of the spatial regions exceed the Hubble horizon. This is a necessary condition for the appearance of classicality of the quantum fluctuation. We further investigate the condition for the appearance of the classical distribution function and find that the condition is given by the inequality for the symplectic eigenvalue of the covariance matrix of the scalar field.