We investigate entanglement production by inhomogeneous perturbations over a homogeneous and isotropic cosmic background, demonstrating that the interplay between quantum and geometric effects can have relevant consequences on entanglement entropy, with respect to homogeneous scenarios. To do so, we focus on a conformally coupled scalar field and discuss how geometric production of scalar particles leads to entanglement. Perturbatively, at first order we find oscillations in entropy correction, whereas at second order the underlying geometry induces mode-mixing on entanglement production. We thus quantify entanglement solely due to geometrical contribution and compare our outcomes with previous findings. We characterize the geometric contribution through geometric (quasi)-particles, interpreted as dark matter candidates.
The thorny issue of relating information theory to cosmology is here addressed by assuming a possible connection between quantum entanglement measures and observable universe. In particular, we propose a cosmological toy model, where the equation of state of the cosmological fluid, which drives the today observed cosmic acceleration, can be inferred from quantum entanglement between different cosmological epochs. In such a way the dynamical dark energy results as byproduct of quantum entanglement.
Most existing cosmological entanglement studies are focused on the isotropic Robertson-Walker (RW) spacetime. Here we go beyond this limitation and study the influence of anisotropy on entanglement generated by dynamical spacetime. Since the isotropic spacetime is viewed as a background medium and the anisotropy is incorporated as perturbation, we decompose entanglement entropy into isotropic and anisotropic contributions. The latter is shown to be non-negligible by analyzing two cosmological models with weak and conformal coupling. We also show the possibility of using entanglement to infer a…
Possible connections between quantum entanglement and cosmological eras are considered. In particular, assuming that two epochs are each other entangled, by measuring the entanglement degree, it is possible to recover dynamical properties of the universe. In particular, the effects of dark energy could be due to the entanglement between states, since a negative pressure arises at late times. In this process, we choose as ruler to quantify the entanglement weight, the so called negativity of entanglement. It follows that a natural anti-gravitational effect occurs when the cosmological eras are …
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 couplin…
We show that quantum decoherence, in the context of observational cosmology, can be connected to the cosmic dark energy. The decoherence signature could be characterized by the existence of quantum entanglement between cosmological eras. As a consequence, the Von Neumann entropy related to the entanglement process, can be compared to the thermodynamical entropy in a homogeneous and isotropic universe. The corresponding cosmological models are compatible with the current observational bounds being able to reproduce viable equations of state without introducing {\it a priori} any cosmological co…
We study the deep connections between the concepts of quantum information theory and cosmology. Employing Fermi normal coordinates and conformal Fermi coordinates, we construct a relation between Friedmann equations of Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker universe and entanglement. Friedmann equations are derived with the first law of entanglement under the assumption that entanglement entropy in a geodesic balls is maximized at fixed volume.
We investigate the behavior of the entanglement entropy of a confining gauge theory near cosmological singularities using gauge/gravity duality. As expected, the coefficients of the UV divergent terms are given by simple geometric properties of the entangling surface in the time-dependent background. The finite (universal) part of the entanglement entropy either grows without bound or remains bounded depending on the nature of the singularity and entangling region. We also discuss a confinement/deconfinement phase transition as signaled by the entanglement entropy.
Although the paradigm of inflation has been extensively studied to demonstrate how macroscopic inhomogeneities in our universe originate from quantum fluctuations, most of the established literature ignores the crucial role that entanglement between the modes of the fluctuating field plays in its observable predictions. In this paper, we import techniques from quantum information theory to reveal hitherto undiscovered predictions for inflation which, in turn, signals how quantum entanglement across cosmological scales can affect large scale structure. Our key insight is that observable long-wa…
We investigate two measures of quantum correlations and entanglement, namely the violation of the Bell-Mermin-Klyshko inequalities and the quantum discord, for Dirac fermions in the cosmological de Sitter background of dimension four. The BMK violation is focussed on the vacuum for two and four mode squeezed states and it is shown to increase with the number of modes. For the quantum discord, we investigate a maximally entangled in-vacuum state. Qualitative similarities as well as differences of our results with that of different coordinatisations of de Sitter in the context of scalar and ferm…
We calculate the entanglement entropy of scalar perturbations due to gravitational non-linearities present in any model of canonically-coupled, single-field ekpyrosis. Specifically, we focus on a recent model of improved ekpyrosis which is able to generate a scale-invariant power spectrum of curvature perturbations and gravitational waves as well as have a non-singular bounce due to an S-brane at the end of ekpyrotic contraction. By requiring that the entanglement entropy remians subdominant to the thermal entropy produced during reheating, we get an upper bound on the energy scale of the boun…
We explore the cosmological consequences of having the fluctuations of the inflaton field entangled with those of another scalar, within the context of a toy model consisting of non-interacting, minimally coupled scalars in a fixed de Sitter background. We find that despite the lack of interactions in the Lagrangian, the initial state entanglement modifies the mode equation for the inflaton fluctuations and thus can induce changes in cosmological observables. These effects are examined for a variety of choices of masses and we find that they can be consistent with the requirement that the back…
We show that the entropy of cosmological perturbations originating as quantum vacuum fluctuations in the very early universe, including the contribution of the leading nonlinear interactions, can be viewed as momentum space entanglement entropy between sub- and super-Hubble modes. The interactions between these modes causes decoherence of the super-Hubble fluctuations which, in turn, leads to a non-vanishing entropy of the reduced density matrix corresponding to the super-Hubble inhomogeneities. In particular, applying this to inflationary cosmology reveals that the entanglement entropy produc…
We investigate the effect of entanglement between two causally separated open charts in de Sitter space on the spectrum of vacuum fluctuations. We consider a free massive scalar field, and construct the reduced density matrix by tracing out the vacuum state for one of the open charts, as recently derived by Maldacena and Pimentel. We formulate the mean-square vacuum fluctuations by using the reduced density matrix and show that the scale invariant spectrum of massless scalar field is realized on small scales. On the other hand, we find that the quantum entanglement affects the shape of the spe…
We propose a \emph{model-independent} approach to study entanglement creation due to the dynamics between two asymptotic quantum regimes in the framework of homogeneous and isotropic universe. We realize it by Padé expansion to reconstruct the functional form of scale factor, rather than postulating it a priori.This amounts to fix the Padé approximants constraining the free parameters in terms of current cosmic observations. Assuming fermions, we solve the Dirac equation for massive particles and we investigate entanglement entropy in terms of modes $k$ and mass $m$. We consider two rational a…
We consider the effects of entanglement in the initial quantum state of scalar and tensor fluctuations during inflation. We allow the gauge-invariant scalar and tensor fluctuations to be entangled in the initial state and compute modifications to the various cosmological power spectra. We compute the angular power spectra ($C_l$'s) for some specific cases of our entangled state and discuss what signals one might expect to find in CMB data. This entanglement also can break rotational invariance, allowing for the possibility that some of the large scale anomalies in the CMB power spectrum might …
We continue the study of entanglement entropy for a QFT through a perturbative expansion of the path integral definition of the reduced density matrix. The universal entanglement entropy for a CFT perturbed by a relevant operator is calculated to second order in the coupling. We also explore the geometric dependence of entanglement entropy for a deformed planar entangling surface, finding surprises at second order.
The emergence of preferred classical variables within a many-body wavefunction is encoded in its entanglement structure in the form of redundant classical information shared between many spatially local subsystems. We show how such structure can be generated via cosmological dynamics from the vacuum state of a massless field, causing the wavefunction to branch into classical field configurations on large scales. An accelerating epoch first excites the vacuum into a superposition of classical fields as well as a highly sensitive bath of squeezed super-horizon modes. During a subsequent decelera…
We explore the cosmological implications of quantum entanglement between two causally disconnected universes in the multiverse. We first consider two causally separated de Sitter spaces with a state which is initially entangled. We derive the reduced density matrix of our universe and compute the spectrum of vacuum fluctuations. We then consider the same system with an initially non-entangled state. We find that scale dependent modulations may enter the spectrum for the case of initially non-entangled state due to quantum interference. This gives rise to the possibility that the existence of c…
The possible imprint of quantum decoherence, in the framework of cosmology, is here investigated. Particular attention is paid to the observational fact that entanglement could lead to the interaction of different eras of cosmic evolution. The role played by decoherence provides the existence of "quantum entanglement" between cosmological eras giving, as observational results, dynamical constraints on the corresponding cosmological models.
We discuss the field quantisation of a free massive Dirac fermion in the two causally disconnected static patches of the de Sitter spacetime, by using mode functions that are normalisable on the cosmological event horizon. Using this, we compute the entanglement entropy of the vacuum state corresponding to these two regions, for a given fermionic mode. Further extensions of this result to more general static spherically symmetric and stationary axisymmetric spacetimes are discussed. For the stationary axisymmetric Kerr-de Sitter spacetime in particular, the variations of the entanglement entro…
Starting from recent results on the geometric formulation of quantum mechanics, we propose a new information geometric characterization of entanglement for spin network states in the context of quantum gravity. For the simple case of a single-link fixed graph (Wilson line), we detail the construction of a Riemannian Fisher metric tensor and a symplectic structure on the graph Hilbert space, showing how these encode the whole information about separability and entanglement. In particular, the Fisher metric defines an entanglement monotone which provides a notion of distance among states in the …
In the present paper, we explore the possible effects of a second rank antisymmetric tensor field, known as Kalb-Ramond (KR) field, on cosmological particle production as well as on quantum entanglement for a massive scalar field propagating in a four dimensional FRW spacetime evolves through a symmetric bounce. For this purpose, the scalar field is considered to be coupled with the KR field and also with the Ricci scalar via the term $\sim ξRΦ^2$ (with $ξ$ be the coupling). The presence of KR field spoils the conformal symmetry of a massless scalar field even for $ξ= 1/6$ in four dimensional …
A gravity-anti-gravity (GaG) odd linear dilaton action offers an eternal inflation evolution governed by the unified (cosmological constant plus radiation) equation of state $ρ-3P=4Λ$. At the mini superspace level, a 'two-particle' variant of the no-boundary proposal, notably 'one-particle' energy dependent, is encountered. While a GaG-odd wave function can only host a weak Big Bang boundary condition, albeit for any $k$, a strong Big Bang boundary condition requires a GaG-even entangled wave function, and singles out $k=0$ flat space. The locally most probable values for the cosmological scal…
We show Zeeman-like splitting in the energy of spinors propagating in a background gravitational field, analogous to the spinors in an electromagnetic field, otherwise termed the Gravitational Zeeman Effect. These spinors are also found to acquire a geometric phase, in a similar way as they do in the presence of magnetic fields. However, in a gravitational background, the Aharonov-Bohm type effect, in addition to Berry-like phase, arises. Based on this result, we investigate geometric phases acquired by neutrinos propagating in a strong gravitational field. We also explore entanglement of neut…
In this paper, we consider a high-curvature limit of the varying fundamental constants toy model in which both the value of the speed of light and the value of the gravitational constant are related to the values of the two non-minimally coupled scalar fields. The high-curvature limit motivates the application of the third quantization procedure to such a toy model which results in a theory that describes bosonic massive particles that move freely in the three-dimensional minisuperspace associated with the degrees of freedom of the original model. Motivated by the idea that in the quantum cosm…
The holographic entanglement entropy (HEE) of the minimal geometrical deformation (MGD) procedure and extensions (EMGD), is scrutinized within the membrane paradigm of AdS/CFT. The HEE corrections of the Schwarzschild and Reissner--Nordström solutions, due to a finite fluid brane tension, are then derived and discussed in the context of the MGD and the EMGD.
The geometric entanglement entropy of a quantum field in the vacuum state is known to be divergent and, when regularized, to scale as the area of the boundary of the region. Here we introduce an operational definition of the entropy of the vacuum restricted to a region: we consider a subalgebra of observables that has support in the region and a finite resolution. We then define the entropy of a state restricted to this subalgebra. For Gaussian states, such as the vacuum of a free scalar field, we discuss how this entropy can be computed. In particular we show that for a spherical region we re…
In this thesis, we aim to understand the microscopic details and origin of the Cosmological Horizon, produced by a static observer in four-dimensional de Sitter (dS$_4$) spacetime. We consider a deformed extension of dS spacetime by means of a single $\mathbb Z_q$ quotient, which resembles an Orbifold geometry. The Orbifold parameter induces a pair of codimension two minimal surfaces given by 2-spheres in the Euclidean geometry. Using dimensional reduction on the two-dimensional plane where the minimal surfaces have support, we use the Liouville field theory and the Kerr/CFT mechanism in order…
We show that, in discrete models of quantum gravity, emergent geometric space can be viewed as the entanglement pattern in a mixed quantum state of the "universe", characterized by a universal topological network entanglement. As a concrete example we analyze the recently proposed model in which geometry emerges due to the condensation of 4-cycles in random regular bipartite graphs, driven by the combinatorial Ollivier-Ricci curvature. Using this model we show that the emergence of geometric order decreases the entanglement entropy of random configurations. The lowest geometric entanglement en…
