The collapse of the wave function in the joint metric-matter quantization for inflation

Understand

It has been argued that the standard inflationary scenario suffers from a serious deficiency as a model for the origin of the seeds of cosmic structure: it can not truly account for the transition from an early homogeneous and isotropic stage to another one lacking such symmetries.

• The issue has often been thought as a standard instance of the "quantum measurement problem", but as has been recently argued by some of us the situation reaches a critical level in the cosmological context of interest here.
• This has lead to a proposal in which the standard paradigm is supplemented by a hypothesis concerning the self-induced dynamical collapse of the wave function, as representing the physical mechanism through which such change of symmetry is brought forth.
• This proposal was formulated within the context of semiclassical gravity.