Inflation is the standard scenario for the Early Universe providing
a mechanism to explain the generation of primordial density perturbations
from which all the structures we see in the universe formed by subsequent
gravitational growth (like, e.g., anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave
Background, or the large-scale distribution of galaxies). The inflationary
seeds for structure formation are traced back to quantum fluctuations
of one or more (scalar) fields. However galaxies or cluster of galaxies
do behave as classical objects. This entails the issue of understanding
a quantum-to-classical transition in a cosmological framework. From
this point of view inflation and cosmological observations can represent
an interesting laboratory to explore some issues related to the quantum
measurement problem. This issue has been long known, still it has
been not explored in full details, and recently there has been a renowned
interest in it. The thesis will consist in a first part of review
of the most recent studies on the subject. It will then focus on some
aspects of the problem, namely how the classical to quantum transition
impacts on primordial gravitational waves which are a smoking gun
of inflation, and whether and how such a transition can leave specific
signatures in cosmological observables that go beyond the usual analyses
(such as, e.g., non-Gaussianity of the cosmological perturbations
from inflation).
Inflation is the standard scenario for the Early Universe providing
a mechanism to explain the generation of primordial density perturbations
from which all the structures we see in the universe formed by subsequent
gravitational growth (like, e.g., anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave
Background, or the large-scale distribution of galaxies). The inflationary
seeds for structure formation are traced back to quantum fluctuations
of one or more (scalar) fields. However galaxies or cluster of galaxies
do behave as classical objects. This entails the issue of understanding
a quantum-to-classical transition in a cosmological framework. From
this point of view inflation and cosmological observations can represent
an interesting laboratory to explore some issues related to the quantum
measurement problem. This issue has been long known, still it has
been not explored in full details, and recently there has been a renowned
interest in it. The thesis will consist in a first part of review
of the most recent studies on the subject. It will then focus on some
aspects of the problem, namely how the classical to quantum transition
impacts on primordial gravitational waves which are a smoking gun
of inflation, and whether and how such a transition can leave specific
signatures in cosmological observables that go beyond the usual analyses
(such as, e.g., non-Gaussianity of the cosmological perturbations
from inflation).
Detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background indicate the large-scale homogeneity of the universe. On very small scales, we observe however inhomogeneities such as galaxies, stars, planets and ourselves. In the context of hot Big-Bang cosmology, these inhomogeneities are often explained as the remains of quantum fluctuations at very early times, enlarged to observable scales through the process of inflation. In this dissertation, I examine two important questions surrounding this scenario: a) How do inherently quantal fluctuations transition to the observed inhomogeneities, which behave classically? ; and b) If the initial state of the universe was symmetric, how can the currently observed state? This dissertation is organized in three parts. Part one first introduces the slow-roll inflation model and then discusses the behavior of small (scalar) perturbations to this model. The second part investigates various answers provided to the questions above, starting with some general observations on the classical limit of quantum mechanics with special attention given to the inverted harmonic oscillator. The formalisms of `squeezing' and decoherence are discussed and weak points are pointed out. In the final part, I examine in detail the pilot-wave approach to the problem, discussing in detail the classical limit of the theory and how pilot-wave theory addresses both questions above. Numerical results for pilot-wave trajectories are presented, illustrating directly the classical limit.
The inflationary paradigm provides a mechanism to generate the primordial perturbations needed to explain the observed large-scale structures in the Universe. Inflation traces back all the inhomogeneities to quantum fluctuations although the structures look classical today. The squeezing of primordial quantum fluctuations along with the mechanism of decoherence accounts for many aspects of this quantum-to-classical transition, although it remains a matter of debate as to whether this is sufficient to explain the issue of the realization of a single outcome (i.e. the issue of macro-objectification) from a quantum ensemble given that the Universe is a closed system. A similar question of the emergence of classical behavior of macroscopic objects exists also for laboratory systems and apart from decoherence there have been attempts to resolve this issue through continuous spontaneous localization (CSL), which is a stochastic nonlinear modification of the nonrelativistic Schr\"odinger equation. Recently, Martin et al. have investigated whether a CSL-like mechanism with a constant strength parameter---when the Mukhanov-Sasaki variable is taken as the ``collapse operator''---can explain how the primordial quantum perturbations generated during inflation become classical. Within the scope of their assumptions they essentially come to a negative conclusion. In the present work, we generalize their analysis by allowing the CSL strength parameter to depend on physical scales so as to capture the CSL amplification mechanism. We show that such a generalization provides a mechanism for the macro-objectification (i.e. classicalization) of the inflationary quantum perturbations, while also preserving the scale invariance of the power spectrum and the phase coherence of superhorizon perturbation modes in a particular class of these models.
Description : This work introduces a novel, model-independent diagnostic framework for quantifying quantum decoherence in primordial inflationary perturbations. The study addresses the fundamental problem of the quantum-to-classical transition in cosmology by defining a normalized persistence functional that captures the suppression of quantum coherence over time. Within an open quantum system approach, each perturbation mode is treated as an effective quantum degree of freedom interacting with an environment, leading to Gaussian suppression of off-diagonal density matrix elements. The proposed functional provides a direct and scalable measure of decoherence efficiency without relying on detailed microscopic modeling. A key feature of the framework is the introduction of a residual coherence parameter, which accounts for possible late-time deviations from complete classicalization. The work further establishes a monotonicity property for the decoherence functional and connects the persistence measure to entropy growth, offering an information-theoretic interpretation of the decoherence process. Importantly, the framework suggests a phenomenological link between residual coherence and observable non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background, opening a pathway for potential observational constraints. The proposed diagnostic functional is broadly applicable across inflationary models and provides a unified tool for comparing decoherence efficiency under different environmental interactions. This work lays the foundation for future studies on quantum signatures in cosmological observables and the persistence of quantum features in the early universe. Keywords : Quantum Decoherence Inflationary Cosmology Primordial Perturbations Open Quantum Systems Quantum-to-Classical Transition Non-Gaussianity Cosmological Perturbation Theory Density Matrix Quantum Cosmology Early Universe Physics Decoherence Functional Entropy and Information Theory
Inflationary cosmology successfully accounts for the observed properties of primordial fluctuations using quantum field theory in an expanding background. However, the quantum nature of these fluctuations has not been experimentally established, since classical stochastic models could reproduce the observed two-point statistics by construction. Existing approaches to testing primordial quantumness focus primarily on Bell inequalities, which provide a sharp conceptual criterion but are difficult to implement with cosmological observables. In this work we adopt a falsification-based approach. We define a precise classical hypothesis for the origin of primordial perturbations (local stochastic fields admitting a positive probability distribution) and identify inequality constraints that must be satisfied within this class. We show how violations of these classicality inequalities can be probed using realistic cosmological observables, without invoking Bell tests or non-commuting measurement settings. We further identify symmetry-protected spectator sectors in which quantum coherence is parametrically preserved during inflation, allowing violations of observable magnitude to survive decoherence. Our results show that large-scale structure and future 21 cm surveys provide a viable and quantitative route to falsifying classical stochastic descriptions of primordial fluctuations.
Introduction Contemporary cosmology includes inflation as one of its central components. It corresponds to a period of accelerated expansion thought to have occurred very early in cosmic history, which takes the universe from relatively generic post Planckian era conditions to a stage where it is well described (with exponential accuracy in the number of e-folds) by a flat Robertson–Walker space-time (which describes a homogeneous and isotropic cosmology). It was initially proposed to resolve various naturalness problems: flatness, horizons, and the excess of massive relic objects, such as topological defects, that were expected to populate the universe according to grand unified theories (GUT). Nowadays, it is lauded because it predicts that the universe's mean density should be essentially identical to the critical value, a very peculiar situation which corresponds to a spatially flat universe. The existing data support this prediction. However, its biggest success is claimed to be the natural account for the emergence of the seeds of cosmic structure in terms of primordial quantum fluctuations, and the correct estimate of the corresponding microwave spectrum. This represents, thus, a situation which requires the combined application of general relativity (GR) and quantum theory, and that, moreover, is tied with observable imprints left from the early universe, in both the radiation in cosmic microwave background (CMB), and in the large scale cosmological structure we can observe today. It should not be surprising that, when dealing with attempts to apply our theories to the universe as a whole, we should come face to face with some of the most profound conceptual problems facing our current physical ideas. In fact, J. Hartle had noted long ago [28] that serious difficulties must be faced when attempting to apply quantum theory to cosmology, although the situations that were envisioned in those early works corresponded to the even more daunting problem of full quantum cosmology, and not the limited use of quantum theory to consider perturbative aspects, which is what is required in the treatment of the inflationary origin of the seeds of cosmic structure. This led him and his collaborators to consider the Consistent Histories framework, which is claimed to offer a version of quantum theory that does not rely on any fundamental notion of measurements, as the favored approach to use in such contexts. We will have a bit more to say about this shortly.
In this thesis, we study the decoherence of cosmological scalar perturbations during inflation. We first discuss the FRW model and cosmic inflation. Inflation is a period of accelerated expansion in the early universe, in typical models caused by a scalar field called inflaton. We review cosmological perturbation theory, where perturbations of the inflaton field and scalar degrees of freedom of the metric tensor are combined into the gauge-invariant Sasaki-Mukhanov variable. We quantize this variable using canonical quantization. Then, we discuss how interactions between the perturbations and their environment can lead to decoherence. In decoherence, the reduced density operator of the perturbations becomes diagonal with respect to a particular pointer basis. We argue that the pointer basis for the cosmological scalar perturbations consists of approximate eigenstates of the field value operator. Finally, we discuss how decoherence can help understand the transition from quantum theory to classical perturbation theory, and justify the standard treatment of perturbations and their initial conditions in cosmology. We conclude that since decoherence should not spoil the observationally successful predictions of this standard treatment, it is unlikely that the actual amount of decoherence could be observed in, say, the CMB radiation.