Journal of High Energy Physics (Feb 2020)

Hot cosmic qubits: late-time de Sitter evolution and critical slowing down

  • Greg Kaplanek,
  • C.P. Burgess

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2020)053
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2020, no. 2
pp. 1 – 41

Abstract

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Abstract Temporal evolution of a comoving qubit coupled to a scalar field in de Sitter space is studied with an emphasis on reliable extraction of late-time behaviour. The phenomenon of critical slowing down is observed if the effective mass is chosen to be sufficiently close to zero, which narrows the window of parameter space in which the Markovian approximation is valid. The dynamics of the system in this case are solved in a more general setting by accounting for non-Markovian effects in the evolution of the qubit state. Self-interactions for the scalar field are also incorporated, and reveal a breakdown of late-time perturbative predictions due to the presence of secular growth.

Keywords