Using Bell Experiments to Test the Quantumness of Primordial Fluctuations

Using Bell Experiments to Test the Quantumness of Primordial Fluctuations
3:00pm
Room 2408 (Lifts 17-18), 2/F Academic Building, HKUST

ABSTRACT

The primordial fluctuations during inflation are widely believed to seed the Large Scale Structure of the universe. However, it remains unknown whether these fluctuations have a quantum nature. According to the inflation theory, the expanding universe creates particle pairs, which are entangled in their momenta due to momentum conservation. Therefore, cosmological Bell inequalities are well motivated and can be formulated using pseudo-spin operators, constructed from operators involving the momenta of the fluctuations. The violation of these Bell inequalities indicates the quantum nature of primordial fluctuations. However, the cosmological Bell test faces several obstructions, including decoherence and the fast-decaying momenta. We thus study the Bell test on scalar modes and tensor modes with decoherence from the interactions of cosmological perturbations, including the bulk and boundary interaction terms. We explore the possibility of extracting the information of the decoherence rate and the structure of primordial interactions from the Bell test. We also discuss the possibility of constructing Bell tests for the entanglement between polarizations, which may avoid the fast-decaying momenta problem and be used to verify the quantum nature of gravity.

 

语言
英文
主办单位
Department of Physics