Sarah Shandera (Penn State)
Date: Tue. May 9th, 2017, 11:00 am-12:00 pmLocation: Miller room
Cosmological open quantum systems
Our current understanding of the universe relies on an inherently quantum origin for the rich, inhomogeneous structure we see today. Inflation (or any of the alternative proposals for the primordial era) easily generates a universe exponentially larger than what we can observe. In other words, the modes that are observationally accessible make up an open quantum system. I will discuss what we might learn by thinking about the universe in this way, even though the quantum structure is probably not observable.