Quantum correlations in inflationary spectra and violation of Bell inequalities

por Renaud Parentani (Universite' de Paris XI, Orsay)

miércoles 14 jun. 2006 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

Sala Seminarios (Dpto. de Física Teórica (UVEG))

The inflationary scenario succesfully accounts for the observed properties of primordial density fluctuations in terms of amplification of vacuum fluctuations. In spite of the macroscopic character of the final amplitudes, we show that the standard inflationary distribution still exhibits inherently quantum mechanical correlations (which cannot be mimicked by any classical stochastic ensemble). We propose a Gedanken experiment for which certain Bell inequalities are violated. We then compute the effect of decoherence and show that the violation persists provided that the decoherence lies below a certain non-vanishing threshold. Finally, there exists a higher threshold above which no violation of any Bell inequalities can occur. In this case only the corresponding distributions can be interpreted as stochastic ensembles of classical fluctuations. (talk based on astro-ph/0510445)