Freiburg 2019 – scientific programme

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FM: Fall Meeting

FM 91: Special Session: Quantum Information Concepts in Astrophysics

FM 91.2: Invited Talk

Friday, September 27, 2019, 11:40–12:20, 2006

Quantum Information and Cosmic Inflation — •Jerome Martin — Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, 98bis boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, France

According to the theory of cosmic inflation, the large scale structures observed in our Universe (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, Cosmic Background Microwave - CMB - anisotropy ...) are of quantum mechanical origin. They are nothing but vacuum fluctuations, stretched to cosmological scales by the cosmic expansion and amplified by gravitational instability. At the end of inflation, these perturbations are placed in a two-mode squeezed state with the strongest squeezing ever produced in Nature (much larger than anything that can be made in the laboratory on Earth). In this talk, one studies whether astrophysical observations could unambiguously reveal this quantum origin by borrowing ideas from quantum information theory. One argues that cosmic inflation is not only a successful paradigm to understand the early Universe. It is also the only situation in Physics where one crucially needs General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to derive the predictions of a theory and, where, at the same time, we have high-accuracy data to test these predictions, making inflation a playground of utmost importance to discuss foundational issues in Quantum Mechanics