Quantum fluctuations and semiclassicality in an inflaton-driven evolution

Abstract

A semiclassical description of quantum systems is applied to probe the dynamics of the cosmological model of an inflationary universe with quadratic inflaton potential, described in a quantum framework of geometrodynamics. The systematic analysis, focusing in particular on the inflationary and post-inflationary epochs, revealed several surprising and counterintuitive features: (i) during inflation the universe rapidly spreads out in volume which leads to significant relative variance by the end of inflation; (ii) despite that, the quantum evolution can still be described to high accuracy by semiclassical methods; (iii) moreover, in the post-inflationary epoch, as the order of included quantum corrections increases, the quantum trajectory approaches the classical one and the description involving second-order corrections only is actually the least accurate there. The consequence of the latter is that the effects of the quantum variances are washed out by the higher-order quantum corrections.