1 research outputs found
Cosmological quantum entanglement
We review recent literature on the connection between quantum entanglement
and cosmology, with an emphasis on the context of expanding universes. We
discuss recent theoretical results reporting on the production of entanglement
in quantum fields due to the expansion of the underlying spacetime. We explore
how these results are affected by the statistics of the field (bosonic or
fermionic), the type of expansion (de Sitter or asymptotically stationary), and
the coupling to spacetime curvature (conformal or minimal). We then consider
the extraction of entanglement from a quantum field by coupling to local
detectors and how this procedure can be used to distinguish curvature from
heating by their entanglement signature. We review the role played by quantum
fluctuations in the early universe in nucleating the formation of galaxies and
other cosmic structures through their conversion into classical density
anisotropies during and after inflation. We report on current literature
attempting to account for this transition in a rigorous way and discuss the
importance of entanglement and decoherence in this process. We conclude with
some prospects for further theoretical and experimental research in this area.
These include extensions of current theoretical efforts, possible future
observational pursuits, and experimental analogues that emulate these cosmic
effects in a laboratory setting.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures. v2 Added journal reference and minor changes to
match the published versio