Statistics of the Microwave Background Anisotropies Caused by Cosmological Perturbations of Quantum-Mechanical Origin

Abstract

The genuine quantum gravity effects can already be around us. It is likely that the observed large-angular-scale anisotropies in the microwave background radiation are induced by cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. Such perturbations are placed in squeezed vacuum quantum states and, hence, are characterized by large variances of their amplitude. The statistical properties of the anisotropies should reflect the underlying statistics of the squeezed vacuum quantum states. In this paper, the theoretical variances for the temperature angular correlation function are described in detail. It is shown that they are indeed large and must be present in the observational data, if the anisotropies are truly caused by the perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. Unfortunately, these large theoretical statistical uncertainties will make the extraction of cosmological information from the measured anisotropies a much more difficult problem than we wanted it to be. This contribution to the Proceedings is largely based on references~[42,8]. The Appendix contains an analysis of the ``standard'' inflationary formula for density perturbations.