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The Open Effective Field Theory of Inflation
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In our quest to understand the generation of cosmological perturbations, we face two serious obstacles: we do not have direct information about the environment experienced by primordial perturbations during inflation, and our observables are practically limited to correlators of massless fields, heavier fields and derivatives decaying exponentially in the number of e-foldings. The flexible and general framework of open systems has been developed precisely to face similar challenges. Building on previous work, we develop a Schwinger-Keldysh path integral description for an open effective field theory of inflation, describing the possibly dissipative and non-unitary evolution of the Goldstone boson of time translations interacting with an unspecified environment, under the key assumption of locality in space and time. Working in the decoupling limit, we study the linear and interacting theory in de Sitter and derive predictions for the power spectrum and bispectrum that depend on a finite number of effective couplings organised in a derivative expansion. The smoking gun of interactions with the environment is an enhanced but finite bispectrum close to the folded kinematical limit. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by matching our open effective theory to an explicit model. Our construction provides a standard model to simultaneously study phenomenological predictions as well as quantum information aspects of the inflationary dynamics.
Forward citations
Cited by 11 Pith papers
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Isotropic universes with a preferred direction
A tuned vector-field EFT can have an exactly isotropic FLRW background while hiding a preferred direction that reappears in perturbations as direction-dependent propagation and scalar–tensor mixing.
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Dissecting the Scalar Cosmological Collider with the Cosmic Microwave Background
A joint Bayesian fit of the multi-field inflationary Lagrangian to Planck bispectrum data finds no cosmological collider signal (max Δχ²=5.3) and shows weak-mixing template searches are invalid except at the smallest masses.
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Searching for Folded Primordial Non-Gaussianity with Galaxy Surveys
The galaxy bispectrum, not the power spectrum, is the main probe of folded primordial non-Gaussianity; narrow folded signals are washed out by Fourier-space binning.
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Stochastic inflation from a non-equilibrium renormalization group
Stochastic inflation is the leading infrared limit of a coarse-grained Schwinger–Keldysh effective theory, and the same Fokker–Planck dynamics follows from a Polchinski-type renormalization-group flow for the reduced ...
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Propagator positivity bounds for cosmological correlators
An infinite tower of two-sided positivity bounds constrains the EFT coefficients of heavy fields on de Sitter, ruling out correlators with no unitary/causal UV completion.
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When inflationary perturbations refuse to classicalise: the role of non-Gaussianity in Wigner negativity
In ultra-slow-roll inflation, the Wigner function of the inflationary Goldstone field becomes negative and its negativity grows with the scale factor squared, so the perturbations do not automatically become classical.
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Inflationary Decoherence from the Gravitational Floor
Gravitational self-interactions alone decohere super-Hubble inflationary fluctuations with purity loss growing as (aH/k)^5, faster than the a^3 growth of earlier calculations.
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Stochastic inflation as an open quantum system
Stochastic inflation emerges from an open-quantum-system derivation, with a Lindblad master equation that reduces to and corrects Starobinsky's Fokker-Planck equation.
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Stochastic inflation as a superfluid
Inflationary superhorizon fluctuations obey superfluid-type continuity and Euler equations, with quantum pressure becoming relevant in ultra-slow-roll phases.
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Emergent structures in open EFTs
Breaking the advanced (r minus a) symmetry in Schwinger-Keldysh open EFTs forces deformed identities among the equations of motion, and the paper gives an explicit deformed diffeomorphism identity for open gravity.
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Lectures on Open Systems and Cosmology
A pedagogical review that presents the density-matrix/master-equation formalism and the Schwinger–Keldysh path integral in one notation and applies them to inflation; it claims no new result.
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