Decoherence of Cosmological Perturbations from Boundary Terms and the Non-Classicality of Gravity

We note that the decoherence of inflationary curvature perturbation $\zeta$ is dominated by a boundary term of the gravity action. Although this boundary term cannot affect cosmological correlators $⟨{\zeta }^n⟩$, it induces much faster decoherence for $\zeta$ than that of previous calculations. The gravitational origin of inflationary decoherence sheds light on the quantum (or non-classical) nature of gravity. By comparing with a Schrödinger-Newton toy model of classical gravity, we show that gravity theories of classical or quantum origins can be distinguished by comparing their different impacts on decoherence rate of $\zeta$. Our calculation also indicates that density fluctuation $\delta \rho$ better preserves quantum information than $\zeta$ for the purpose of constructing cosmological Bell-like experiments.