1 research outputs found
The collapse of the wave function in the joint metric-matter quantization for inflation
It has been argued that the standard inflationary scenario suffers from a
serious deficiency as a model for the origin of the seeds of cosmic structure:
it can not truly account for the transition from an early homogeneous and
isotropic stage to another one lacking such symmetries. The issue has often
been thought as a standard instance of the "quantum measurement problem", but
as has been recently argued by some of us the situation reaches a critical
level in the cosmological context of interest here. This has lead to a proposal
in which the standard paradigm is supplemented by a hypothesis concerning the
self-induced dynamical collapse of the wave function, as representing the
physical mechanism through which such change of symmetry is brought forth. This
proposal was formulated within the context of semiclassical gravity. Here we
investigate an alternative realization of such idea implemented directly within
the standard analysis in terms of a quantum field jointly describing the
inflaton and metric perturbations, the so called Mukhanov-Sasaki variable. We
show that even though the prescription is quite different, the theoretical
predictions include some deviations from the standard ones, which are indeed
very similar to those found in the early studies. We briefly discuss the
differences between the two at both, the conceptual and practical levels.Comment: 31 pages, 6 figures. Replaced to match the published versio