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Inflation And The Quantum Measurement Problem, Stephon Alexander, Dhrubo Jyoti, João Magueijo
Inflation And The Quantum Measurement Problem, Stephon Alexander, Dhrubo Jyoti, João Magueijo
Dartmouth Scholarship
We propose a solution to the quantum measurement problem in inflation. Our model treats Fourier modes of cosmological perturbations as analogous to particles in a weakly interacting Bose gas. We generalize the idea of a macroscopic wave function to cosmological fields, and construct a self-interaction Hamiltonian that focuses that wave function. By appropriately setting the coupling between modes, we obtain the standard adiabatic, scale-invariant power spectrum. Because of central limit theorem, we recover a Gaussian random field, consistent with observations.