Quantum state of interacting primordial inhomogeneities: de-squeezing and decoherence

TL;DR

This paper studies how interactions during inflation influence the quantum state of scalar perturbations, revealing that they cause de-squeezing and decoherence, which suppress quantum correlations and affect their quantum or classical nature.

Contribution

It introduces a Lindblad equation approach to model interactions in inflationary perturbations and analyzes their impact on quantum state purity and squeezing.

Findings

Interactions significantly reduce the squeezing parameter.

Interactions cause a loss of quantum purity.

Quantum correlations are suppressed by interactions.

Abstract

We investigate how interactions affect the quantum state of scalar perturbations during inflation and the quantum correlations they may exhibit. Focusing on the case of scalar perturbations in single-field inflation, we model interactions using a Lindblad equation with a non-unitary contribution quadratic in the scalar perturbations, and of parametrisable amplitude and time dependence. We compute the quantum state of these interacting perturbations, which is fully described by its purity and squeezing parameters. First, we show that, in most of the parameter space, not only the purity but also the squeezing parameter is significantly reduced by interactions. Second, we show that this de-squeezing induced by the interactions, on top of the purity loss, causes a further suppression of quantum correlations. We thus emphasise that the quantum or classical character of the correlations exhibited by the perturbations cannot be correctly determined by computing the effect of interactions on the purity alone. Since the phenomenological framework adopted in this paper encompasses a wide class of possible interactions, our results provide general insights into the nature of decoherence processes in primordial fluctuations.