Abstract
There is a widespread belief that the classical small inhomogeneities which gave rise to all structures in the Universe through gravitational instability originated from primordial quantum cosmological fluctuations. However, this transition from quantum to classical fluctuations is plagued with important conceptual issues, most of them related to the application of standard quantum theory to the Universe as a whole. In this contribution, it is shown how these issues can easily be overcome in the framework of the de Broglie-Bohm quantum theory. This theory is an alternative to standard quantum theory that provides an objective description of physical reality, where rather ambiguous notions of measurement or observer play no fundamental role, and which can hence be applied to the Universe as a whole. In addition, it allows for a simple and unambiguous characterization of the classical limit. This contribution is a compilation of the works done by Grasiele Santos, Ward Struyve and myself cited in Pinto-Neto et al. (Phys Rev D 85:083506, 2012; Phys Rev D 89:023517, 2014), where all details can be found.
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- 1.
In the de Broglie-Bohm approach, it is possible to obtain the effective theory of perturbations from the full quantization of the background geometry and linear perturbations, see Falciano and Pinto-Neto (2009).
- 2.
In fact, as A 1 and A 2 depend on k, this assertion depends on the scale we are talking about. For an almost scale invariant spectrum of cosmological perturbations, the A 2 term is larger than the A 1 term for all scales of cosmological interest, which enforces the argumentation described below for the transition of quantum-to-classical behavior in bouncing models. Only for very short wavelengths can the A 1 term be bigger than A 2.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank CNPq of Brazil for financial support and Daniel Sudarsky for some illuminating discussions on this problem.
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Pinto-Neto, N. (2016). The Quantum-to-Classical Transition of Primordial Cosmological Perturbations. In: Fabris, J., Piattella, O., Rodrigues, D., Velten, H., Zimdahl, W. (eds) The Cosmic Microwave Background. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44769-8_11
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