Quantum discord of cosmic inflation: Can we show that CMB anisotropies are of quantum-mechanical origin?

Abstract

We investigate the quantumness of primordial cosmological fluctuations and its detectability. The quantum discord of inflationary perturbations is calculated for an arbitrary splitting of the system, and shown to be very large on super-Hubble scales. This entails the presence of large quantum correlations, due to the entangled production of particles with opposite momentums during inflation. To determine how this is reflected at the observational level, we study whether quantum correlators can be reproduced by a non-discordant state, i.e. a state with vanishing discord that contains classical correlations only. We demonstrate that this can be done for the power spectrum, the price to pay being twofold: first, large errors in other two-point correlation functions and second, the presence of intrinsic non-Gaussianity. The detectability of these two features remains to be determined but could possibly rule out a non-discordant description of the cosmic microwave background. If one abandons the idea that perturbations should be modeled by quantum mechanics and wants to use a classical stochastic formalism instead, we show that any two-point correlators on super-Hubble scales can be exactly reproduced regardless of the squeezing of the system. The latter becomes important only for higher-order correlation functions that can be accurately reproduced only in the strong squeezing regime.