Hilbert space representations of decoherence functionals and quantum measures

We show that any decoherence functional D can be represented by a spanning vector-valued measure on a complex Hilbert space. Moreover, this representation is unique up to an isomorphism when the system is finite. We consider the natural map U from the history Hilbert space K to the standard Hilbert space H of the usual quantum formulation. We show that U is an isomorphism from K onto a closed subspace of H and that U is an isomorphism from K onto H if and only if the representation is spanning. We then apply this work to show that a quantum measure has a Hilbert space representation if and only if it is strongly positive. We also discuss classical decoherence functionals, operator-valued measures and quantum operator measures.

DECOHERENCE FUNCTIONAL AND INHOMOGENEITIES IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE

We investigate the quantum to classical transition of small inhomogeneous fluctuations in the early Universe using the decoherence functional of Gell-Mann and Hartle. We study two types of coarse graining; one due to coarse graining the value of the scalar field and the other due to summing over an environment. We compare the results with a previous study using an environment and the off-diagonal rule proposed by Zurek. We show that the two methods give different results.