We compute the entanglement entropy, mutual information and quantum discord of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations in real space. To that end, we first show that measurements of these fluctuations at two distinct spatial locations can be described by a bipartite, continuous Gaussian system. This leads to explicit formulas for the mutual information and the quantum discord in terms of the Fourier-space power spectra of the curvature perturbation. We then find that quantum entanglement, that builds up in Fourier space between opposite wave momenta as an effect of quantum squeezing, is transferred to real space. In particular, both the mutual information and quantum discord, which decay as the fourth power of the distance between the two measurements in flat space time, asymptotes a constant in cosmological backgrounds. At the scales probed in the CMB however, they are highly suppressed, while they can reach order-one values at much smaller scales, where primordial black holes could have formed.
We compute the entanglement entropy, mutual information and quantum discord of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations in real space. To that end, we first show that measurements of these fluctuations at two distinct spatial locations can be described by a bipartite, continuous Gaussian system. This leads to explicit formulas for the mutual information and the quantum discord in terms of the Fourier-space power spectra of the curvature perturbation. We then find that quantum entanglement, that builds up in Fourier space between opposite wave momenta as an effect of quantum squeezing, is transferred to real space. In particular, both the mutual information and quantum discord, which decay as the fourth power of the distance between the two measurements in flat space time, asymptotes a constant in cosmological backgrounds. At the scales probed in the CMB however, they are highly suppressed, while they can reach order-one values at much smaller scales, where primordial black holes could have formed.
We introduce a new method permitting the analytical determination of entanglement entropy (and related quantities) between configurations of a quantum field, which is either free or in interaction with a classical source, at two distinct spatial locations. We show how such a setup can be described by a bipartite, continuous Gaussian system. This allows us to derive explicit and exact formulas for the entanglement entropy, the mutual information and the quantum discord, solely in terms of the Fourier-space power spectra of the field. This contrasts with previous studies, which mostly rely on numerical considerations. As an illustration, we apply our formalism to massless fields in flat space, where exact expressions are derived that only involve the ratio between the size of the regions over which the field is coarse-grained, and the distance between these regions. In particular, we recover the well-known fact that mutual information decays as the fourth power of this ratio at large distances, as previously observed in numerical works. Our method leads to the first analytical derivation of this result, and to an exact formula that also applies to arbitrary distances. Finally, we determine the quantum discord and find that it identically vanishes (unless coarse-graining is performed over smeared spheres, in which case it obeys the same suppression at large distance as mutual information).
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.
Abstract Bell-inequality violations reveal the presence of quantum correlations between two particles that have interacted and then separated. Their generalisation to quantum fields is necessary to study a number of field-theoretic setups, such as cosmological density fluctuations. In this work, we show how Bell operators can be constructed for quantum fields in real space, and for Gaussian states we compute their expectation value in terms of the field power spectra. We then apply our formalism to a scalar field in de-Sitter space-time. We find that, in spite of the tremendous production of entangled particles with opposite wave momenta on large scales, Bell inequalities are not violated in real space. The reason is that, when considering measurements of a field at two distinct locations in real space, one implicitly traces over the configuration of the field at every other location, leading to a mixed bipartite system. This “effective decoherence” effect is responsible for the erasure of quantum features, and casts some doubts on our ability to reveal the quantum origin of cosmological structures. We finally discuss these results in the light of quantum discord.
According to the theory of cosmic inflation, the large scale structures observed in our Universe (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, Cosmic Background Microwave—CMB—anisotropy…) are of quantum mechanical origin. They are nothing but vacuum fluctuations, stretched to cosmological scales by the cosmic expansion and amplified by gravitational instability. At the end of inflation, these perturbations are placed in a two-mode squeezed state with the strongest squeezing ever produced in Nature (much larger than anything that can be made in the laboratory on Earth). This article studies whether astrophysical observations could unambiguously reveal this quantum origin by borrowing ideas from quantum information theory. It is argued that some of the tools needed to carry out this task have been discussed long ago by J. Bell in a, so far, largely unrecognized contribution. A detailled study of his paper and of the criticisms that have been put forward against his work is presented. Although J. Bell could not have realized it when he wrote his letter since the quantum state of cosmological perturbations was not yet fully characterized at that time, it is also shown that Cosmology and cosmic inflation represent the most interesting frameworks to apply the concepts he investigated. This confirms that cosmic inflation is not only a successful paradigm to understand the early Universe. It is also the only situation in Physics where one crucially needs General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to derive the predictions of a theory and, where, at the same time, we have high-accuracy data to test these predictions, making inflation a playground of utmost importance to discuss foundational issues in Quantum Mechanics.
In the framework of the theory of open systems based on completely positive quantum dynamical semigroups, we give a description of the continuous-variable quantum entanglement and quantum discord for a system consisting of two noninteracting modes embedded in a thermal environment. Entanglement and discord are used to quantify the quantum correlations of the system. For all values of the temperature of the thermal reservoir, an initially separable Gaussian state remains separable for all times. We study the time evolution of logarithmic negativity, which characterizes the degree of entanglement, and we show that in the case of an entangled initial Gaussian state, entanglement suppression (entanglement sudden death) takes place for non-zero temperatures of the environment. Only for zero temperature of the thermal bath the initial entangled state remains entangled for finite times. We analyze time evolution of Gaussian quantum discord, which is a measure of all quantum correlations in the bipartite state, including entanglement, and we show that quantum discord decays asymptotically in time under the effect of thermal bath. This is in contrast with the sudden death of entanglement. Before the suppression of entanglement, the qualitative evolution of quantum discord is very similar to that of the entanglement. We describe also time evolution of the degree of classical correlations and of quantum mutual information, which measures the total correlations of quantum system.
Studies of quantum field entanglement in de Sitter space based on the von Neumann entropy of local patches have concluded that curvature enhances entanglement between regions and their complements. Similar conclusions about entanglement enhancement have been reached in analyses of Fourier modes in the cosmological patch of de Sitter space. We challenge this interpretation by adopting a fully local approach: examining entanglement between pairs of field modes compactly supported within de Sitter's cosmological patch. Our approach is formulated in terms of the properties of a metric tensor and an associated complex structure induced by the Bunch-Davies vacuum on the classical phase space. We find that increasing curvature increases correlations between local modes but, somewhat counterintuitively, decreases their entanglement. Our methods allow us to characterize how entanglement is spatially distributed, revealing that a cosmological constant, even if tiny, qualitatively alters the vacuum's entanglement structure. We show that our results are compatible with previous entropy-based studies when properly interpreted. Our findings have implications for entanglement between observables generated during cosmic inflation.