Cosmological Decoherence from Thermal Gravitons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal gravitons induce decoherence in cosmological tunneling processes, especially in de Sitter space, potentially impacting early universe evolution and black hole physics.

Contribution

It introduces a calculation of the thermal graviton-induced decoherence rate affecting false vacuum decay in cosmology, highlighting an unavoidable decoherence effect in de Sitter space.

Findings

Thermal gravitons cause significant decoherence in false vacuum tunneling.

Decoherence rate is linked to the de Sitter horizon's thermal graviton background.

Implications for cosmological evolution and black hole physics are discussed.

Abstract

We study the effects of gravitationally-driven decoherence on tunneling processes associated with false vacuum decays, such as the Coleman--De~Luccia instanton. We compute the thermal graviton-induced decoherence rate for a wave function describing a perfect fluid of nonzero energy density in a finite region. When the effective cosmological constant is positive, the thermal graviton background sourced by a de Sitter horizon provides an unavoidable decoherence effect, which may have important consequences for tunneling processes in cosmological history. We discuss generalizations and consequences of this effect and comment on its observability and applications to black hole physics.