Journal of High Energy Physics (Aug 2020)

Cosmological decoherence from thermal gravitons

  • Ning Bao,
  • Aidan Chatwin-Davies,
  • Jason Pollack,
  • Grant N. Remmen

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2020)065
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2020, no. 8
pp. 1 – 28

Abstract

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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.

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