On decoherence of cosmological perturbations and stochastic inflation

Abstract

By making a suitable generalization of the Starobinsky stochastic inflation, we propose a classical phase space formulation of stochastic inflation which may be used for a quantitative study of decoherence of cosmological perturbations during inflation. The precise knowledge of how much cosmological perturbations have decohered is essential to the understanding of acoustic oscillations of cosmological microwave background (CMB) photons. In order to show how the method works, we provide the relevant equations for a self-interacting inflaton field. For pedagogical reasons and to provide a link to the field theoretical case, we consider the quantum stochastic harmonic oscillator.