High Energy Theory Seminar

Given the vast landscape of possible inflationary models, understanding how to effectively parametrize the impact of unobserved degrees of freedom (or environmental effects) is a crucial challenge. As a small step in this direction, I will explore how path integral methods can be used to analyze the reduced density matrix of the inflaton in simple models where an additional isocurvature scalar field plays the role of the environment. In particular, I will highlight the utility of the Feynman-Vernon influence functional in efficiently computing cosmological correlators, and discuss quantum phenomena such as decoherence (and recoherence), as well as the scaling of out-of-time-ordered correlators, which characterize the scrambling of quantum information.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact theoryinfo@caltech.edu for Zoom information.