Note on decoherence of the cosmological background by thermal perturbations in the language of open quantum systems

Abstract

We study, within a toy model, how a thermal bath of cosmological perturbations can decohere the homogeneous degrees of freedom of the universe, treating the perturbations as an environment in the framework of open quantum systems. In contrast to several earlier approaches, instead of tracing out the perturbations from a semiclassical ansatz for the total wave function, we incorporate their cosmological backreaction through an effective second-order coupling and derive a master equation. Our toy model consists of a spatially flat semiclassical inflationary universe with a clock field in the slow-roll regime, while scalar cosmological perturbations in an assumed thermal-like state constitute the environment. One of the features of the model is the absence of the Markov approximation. The resulting coupling constant is determined by thermal correlation functions of the quantized perturbation modes. Within this framework, we find that, for a representative set of parameter estimates, the characteristic decoherence timescale corresponding to the thermal contribution can be shorter than the Hubble timescale. In addition, we address the question of whether the pointer-state structure induced by the decoherence in such a framework could provide a criterion for the choice of semiclassical states in the early universe.