Talks

Models for gravitationally induced decoherence can be formulated within the framework of open quantum systems, in which gravity is chosen as the environment and quantised together with the system under consideration. The effective dynamics of the system under the influence of the environment are encoded in the so-called master equation. Existing phenomenological models often take the Lindblad equation as the starting point for the master equation, while from the perspective of quantum gravity approaches, an underlying microscopic model from which a field-theoretical master equation can be derived seems to be the more accessible approach, which also makes it possible to establish a connection between microscopic and phenomenological models.

Perturbative calculations with light and polynomially self-interacting scalar fields in de Sitter spacetime are commonly plagued by infrared divergences as the scalar fluctuations become strongly coupled on large scales. Using techniques familiar from stochastic inflation, we treat super-Hubble fluctuations non-perturbatively through a probability distribution featuring composite operators of the light scalar. We find that these composite operators behave like late-time conformal primaries and admit a power-law four-point function in position space that is strikingly simple. We attribute physical meaning to these composite operators and conjecture that light interacting scalars in de Sitter in the stochastic picture hadronize into a tower of composite scalars on superhorizon scales. We further investigate whether these composite scalars can be described by a weakly-coupled effective field theory.