2017 Theses Doctoral
Topics in Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics: Entanglement Harvesting and Cosmic Bubble Collisions
This dissertation explores two topics located in the intersection of quantum mechanics and cosmology. Entanglement harvesting is a phenomenon in which quantum entanglement can develop between the states of two Unruh-DeWitt detectors travelling through spacetime by way of mutual interaction with a scalar quantum field. I numerically explore entanglement harvesting of Unruh-DeWitt detectors in Minkowski space travelling with constant acceleration, generalizing previous analytical results which held only in a limiting case. Cosmic bubble collisions arise in inflationary cosmology as a mechanism to begin reheating at the end of inflation. I extend the previously proposed theory of boom and bust inflation which relies on the existence of a large extra dimension by exploring particular inflationary models in which reheating need not begin the first time that two bubble walls collide. This allows for a smaller lower bound on the size of the compact extra dimension in the boom and bust proposal.
Files
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Brainerd_columbia_0054D_14047.pdf application/pdf 2.98 MB Download File
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Physics
- Thesis Advisors
- Greene, Brian
- Degree
- Ph.D., Columbia University
- Published Here
- July 23, 2017