arXiv subjects

Junsei Tokuda

Publications and source records attributed to Junsei Tokuda.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

False and genuine decoherence in the early universe: a local observer and time-averaged observables

We study quantum decoherence of curvature perturbations at superhorizon scales caused by the gravitational nonlinearities. We show that cubic gravitational couplings, constrained by the spatial diffeomorphism invariance, lead to infrared (IR) and ultraviolet (UV) divergences in the decoherence rate at one loop. These divergences arise from fluctuations of deep IR modes which look like a background mode for a local observer and violent zero-point fluctuations in the deep UV, respectively. We argue that these divergences are unobservable, as they vanish when considering proper observables. We consider correlators defined using the geodesic distance for IR divergences and time-averaged correlators for UV divergences. To account for these observer's perspectives, we propose to consider an effective quantum state, defined in terms of actual observables, as a more appropriate probe of the quantum coherence of the system measured by an observer. We then evaluate the finite decoherence rate induced by superhorizon environment during inflation and at late universe.

hep-th↗

arXiv2024

String loops and gravitational positivity bounds: imprint of light particles at high energies

We study loop corrections to positivity bounds on effective field theories in the context of $2\to 2$ scattering in gravitational theories, in the presence of light particles. It has been observed that certain negative contributions at low energies are enhanced by inverse powers of a small mass $m$ and are nontrivial to cancel against other low-energy contributions. These originate from near the forward limit of diagrams involving graviton exchange. We observe that scattering in this kinematics domain remains infrared-sensitive even at high center-of-mass energy. By considering a string-inspired model in which high-energy loops can be calculated using unitarity and Regge behavior of tree amplitudes, we uncover a natural mechanism through which $1/m$-enhanced terms perfectly cancel between low and high energy contributions. This concretely explains possible positivity violations in the presence of gravity from the high-energy viewpoint.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Stochastic tunneling in de Sitter spacetime

Tunneling processes in de Sitter spacetime are studied by using the stochastic approach. We exploit the Martin-Siggia-Rose-Janssen-de Dominicis (MSRJD) functional integral to obtain the tunneling rate. The applicability conditions of this method are clarified using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. In the case of a shallow potential barrier, we reproduce the Hawking-Moss (HM) tunneling rate. Remarkably, in contrast to HM picture, the configuration derived from the MSRJD functional integral satisfies physically natural boundary conditions. We also discuss the case of a steep potential barrier and find an interesting Coleman-de Luccia (CDL) bubble-like configuration. Our results demonstrate how the bubble nucleation process could be described in the stochastic approach. Our method turns out to be useful for investigating various tunneling processes during inflation.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Cancellation of quantum corrections on the soft curvature perturbations

We study the cancellation of quantum corrections on the superhorizon curvature perturbations from subhorizon physics beyond the single-clock inflation from the viewpoint of the cosmological soft theorem. As an example, we focus on the transient ultra-slow-roll inflation scenario and compute the one-loop quantum corrections to the power spectrum of curvature perturbations taking into account nontrivial surface terms in the action. We find that Maldacena's consistency relation is satisfied and guarantees the cancellation of contributions from the short-scale modes. As a corollary, primordial black hole production in single-field inflation scenarios is not excluded by perturbativity breakdown even for the sharp transition case in contrast to some recent claims in the literature. We also comment on the relation between the tadpole diagram in the in-in formalism and the shift of the elapsed time in the stochastic-$\delta N$ formalism. We find our argument is not directly generalisable to the tensor perturbations.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

New lower bounds on scattering amplitudes: non-locality constraints

Under reasonable working assumptions including the polynomial boundedness, one proves the well-known Cerulus-Martin lower bound on how fast an elastic scattering amplitude can decrease in the hard-scattering regime. In this paper we consider two non-trivial extensions of the previous bound. (i) We generalize the assumption of polynomial boundedness by allowing amplitudes to exponentially grow for some complex momenta and prove a more general lower bound in the hard-scattering regime. (ii) We prove a new lower bound on elastic scattering amplitudes in the Regge regime, in both cases of polynomial and exponential boundedness. A bound on the Regge trajectory for negative momentum transfer squared is also derived. We discuss the relevance of our results for understanding gravitational scattering at the non-perturbative level and for constraining ultraviolet completions. In particular, we use the new bounds as probes of non-locality in black-hole formation, perturbative string theory, classicalization, Galileons, and infinite-derivative field theories, where both the polynomial boundedness and the Cerulus-Martin bound are violated.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Gravitational Positivity for Phenomenologists: Dark Gauge Boson in the Swampland

The gravitational positivity bound gives quantitative "swampland'' constraints on low-energy effective theories inside theories of quantum gravity. We give a comprehensive discussion of this bound for those interested in applications to phenomenological model building. We present a practical recipe for deriving the bound, and discuss subtleties relevant for realistic models. As an illustration, we study the positivity bound on the scattering of the massive gauge bosons in the Higgs/St\"{u}ckelberg mechanism. Under certain assumptions on gravitational amplitudes at high energy, we obtain a lower bound $m_{V} \gtrsim \Lambda_\mathrm{UV}^2 /g M_\mathrm{Pl}$ on the gauge boson mass $m_V$, where $g$ is the coupling constant of the gauge field, $M_\mathrm{Pl}$ is the reduced Planck mass and $\Lambda_\mathrm{UV}$ is the ultraviolet cutoff of the effective field theory. This bound can strongly constrain new physics models involving a massive gauge boson.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2022

Cosmological gravity probes: connecting recent theoretical developments to forthcoming observations

Since the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the present Universe, significant theoretical developments have been made in the area of modified gravity. In the meantime, cosmological observations have been providing more high-quality data, allowing us to explore gravity on cosmological scales. To bridge the recent theoretical developments and observations, we present an overview of a variety of modified theories of gravity and the cosmological observables in the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure, supplemented with a summary of predictions for cosmological observables derived from cosmological perturbations and sophisticated numerical studies. We specifically consider scalar-tensor theories in the Horndeski and DHOST family, massive gravity/bigravity, vector-tensor theories, metric-affine gravity, and cuscuton/minimally-modified gravity, and discuss the current status of those theories with emphasis on their physical motivations, validity, appealing features, the level of maturity, and calculability. We conclude that the Horndeski theory is one of the most well-developed theories of modified gravity, although several remaining issues are left for future observations. The paper aims to help to develop strategies for testing gravity with ongoing and forthcoming cosmological observations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Finite energy sum rules for gravitational Regge amplitudes

We develop a framework to derive consistency constraints on gravitational Regge amplitudes based on the finite energy sum rules (FESRs), which directly connect gravitational Regge amplitudes at a finite ultraviolet scale with infrared physics without suffering from super-Planckian physics. For illustration, we consider four-point scattering of an identical massless scalar coupled to gravity. First, we derive multiple FESRs without relying on the $s\text{-}t\text{-}u$ permutation invariance. We then make use of FESRs, crossing symmetry, and other principles such as unitarity, to derive bounds on the Regge parameters. The bounds result in infrared finite gravitational positivity bounds in four spacetime dimensions.

hep-th↗

arXiv2022

Phenomenological Motivation for Gravitational Positivity Bounds: A Case Study of Dark Sector Physics

Positivity bounds on scattering amplitudes provide a necessary condition for a low-energy effective field theory to have a consistent ultraviolet completion. Their extension to gravity theories has been studied in the past years aiming at application to the swampland program, showing that positivity bounds hold at least approximately even in the presence of gravity. An issue in this context is how much negativity is allowed for a given scattering process. In this paper we address importance of this rather technical issue by demonstrating that it is relevant to physics within the scope of ongoing experiments, especially in the context of dark sector physics. In particular, we provide detailed analysis of dark photon scenarios as an illustrative example. This motivates further studies on gravitational positivity bounds.

hep-th↗

arXiv2021

Gravitational Positivity Bounds on Scalar Potentials

We derive constraints on scalar field theories coupled to gravity by using recently developed positivity bounds in the presence of gravity. It is found that a canonically-normalized real scalar cannot have an arbitrarily flat potential unless some new physics enters well below the Planck scale. An upper bound on the scale of new physics is determined by loop corrections to the self-energy. Our result provides a swampland condition for scalar potentials.

hep-th↗

arXiv2021

Is the Standard Model in the Swampland? Consistency Requirements from Gravitational Scattering

We study compatibility of the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity by means of gravitational positivity bounds, which provide a necessary condition for a low-energy gravitational theory to be UV completable within the weakly coupled regime of gravity. In particular, we identify the cutoff scale of the Standard Model coupled to gravity by studying consistency of light-by-light scattering. While the precise value depends on details of the Pomeron effects in QCD, the cutoff scale reads $10^{16}$GeV if the single-Pomeron exchange picture works well up to this scale. We also demonstrate that the cutoff scale is lowered to $10^{13}$GeV if we consider the electroweak theory without the QCD sector.

hep-th↗

arXiv2021

Indirect detection of gravitons through quantum entanglement

We propose an experiment that the entanglement between two macroscopic mirrors suspended at the end of an equal-arm interferometer is destroyed by the noise of gravitons through bremsstrahlung. By calculating the correlation function of the noise, we obtain the decoherence time from the decoherence functional. We estimate that the decoherence time induced by the noise of gravitons in squeezed states stemming from inflation is approximately 20 seconds for 40 km long arms and 40 kg mirrors. Our analysis shows that observation of the decoherence time of quantum entanglement has the potential to detect gravitons indirectly. This indirect detection of gravitons would give strong evidence of quantum gravity.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2020

Gravitational positivity bounds

We study the validity of positivity bounds in the presence of a massless graviton, assuming the Regge behavior of the amplitude. Under this assumption, the problematic $t$-channel pole is canceled with the UV integral of the imaginary part of the amplitude in the dispersion relation, which gives rise to finite corrections to the positivity bounds. We find that low-energy effective field theories (EFT) with "wrong" sign are generically allowed. The allowed amount of the positivity violation is determined by the Regge behavior. This violation is suppressed by $M_{\rm pl}^{-2}\alpha'$ where $\alpha'$ is the scale of Reggeization. This implies that the positivity bounds can be applied only when the cutoff scale of EFT is much lower than the scale of Reggeization. We then obtain the positivity bounds on scalar-tensor EFT at one-loop level. Implications of our results on the degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor (DHOST) theory are also discussed.

hep-th↗

arXiv2020

Noise and decoherence induced by gravitons

We study quantum noise and decoherence induced by gravitons. We derive a Langevin equation of geodesic deviation in the presence of gravitons. The amplitude of noise correlations tells us that large squeezing is necessary to detect the noise. We also consider the decoherence of spatial superpositions of two massive particles caused by gravitons in the vacuum state and find that gravitons could give a relevant contribution to the decoherence. The decoherence induced by gravitons would offer new vistas to test quantum gravity in tabletop experiments.

hep-th↗

arXiv2019

Extension of positivity bounds to non-local theories: IR obstructions to Lorentz invariant UV completions

We derive positivity bounds on low energy effective field theories which admit gapped, analytic, unitary, Lorentz invariant, and possibly non-local UV completions, by considering 2 to 2 scatterings of Jaffe fields whose Lehmann-K\"{a}ll\'{e}n spectral density can grow exponentially. Several properties of S-matrix, such as analyticity properties, are assumed in our derivation. Interestingly, we find that some of the positivity bounds obtained in the literature, such as sub-leading order forward-limit bounds, must be satisfied even when UV completions fall into non-localizable theories in Jaffe's language, unless momentum space Wightman functions grow too rapidly at high energy. Under this restriction on the growth rate, such bounds may provide IR obstructions to analytic, unitary, and Lorentz invariant UV completions.

hep-th↗

arXiv2018

Can all the infrared secular growth really be understood as increase of classical statistical variance?

It is known that in the theory of light scalar fields during inflation, correlation functions suffer from infrared (IR) divergences or large IR loop corrections, leading to the breakdown of perturbation theory. In order to understand the physical meaning of such IR enhancement, we investigate the stochastic properties of an effective equation of motion (EoM) for long-wavelength modes of a canonically normalized light scalar field $\phi$ with a general sufficiently flat interaction potential on de Sitter background. Firstly, we provide an alternative refined derivation of the effective action for long-wavelength modes which leads to the effective EoM that correctly reproduces all the IR correlation functions in a good approximation at a late time, by integrating out short-wavelength modes. Next, under the assumption that one can neglect non-local correlations in the influence functional exceeding the coarse-graining scale, we show that the effective EoM for IR modes of the "average field" in Schwinger-Keldysh formalism $\phi^<_c$ can be interpreted as a classical stochastic process in the present model.

hep-th↗

arXiv2017

Statistical nature of infrared dynamics on de Sitter background

In this study, we formulate a systematic way of deriving an effective equation of motion(EoM) for long wavelength modes of a massless scalar field with a general potential $V(\phi)$ on de Sitter background, and investigate whether or not the effective EoM can be described as a classical stochastic process. Our formulation gives an extension of the usual stochastic formalism to including sub-leading secular growth coming from the nonlinearity of short wavelength modes. Applying our formalism to $\lambda \phi^4$ theory, we explicitly derive an effective EoM which correctly recovers the next-to-leading secularly growing part at a late time, and show that this effective EoM can be seen as a classical stochastic process. Our extended stochastic formalism can describe all secularly growing terms which appear in all correlation functions with a specific operator ordering, which will not be a big drawback because the commutator of a light scalar field becomes negligible at large scales owing to the squeezing.

gr-qc↗