The Hanbury-Brown and Twiss effect in inflationary cosmological perturbations

Abstract: The simplest model of inflation is based around an inflaton field that starts in a coherent false vacuum state with a positive cosmological constant, rolls slowly to the true vacuum and relaxes to it via reheating. We examine whether the scale of the transition from coherence to chaoticity can be examined via the Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect, in parallel with analogous problems of heavy ion physics (the ``pion laser'' and the thermalizing glasma). We develop an ansatz which contains a definition of ''chaoticity'' which parallels that of the usual setups where HBT is used. However, we also discuss the differences between the inflationary setup and more mainstream uses of HBT and conclude that these are more significant than the similarities, making the use of the developed methodology uncertain.