Effective action and decoherence by fermions in quantum cosmology

We develop the formalism for the one-loop no-boundary state in a cosmological model with fermions. We use it to calculate the reduced density matrix for an inflaton field by tracing out the fermionic degrees of freedom, yielding both the fermionic effective action and the standard decoherence factor. We show that dimensional regularisation of ultraviolet divergences would lead to an inconsistent density matrix. Suppression of these divergences to zero is instead performed through a non-local Bogoliubov transformation of the fermionic variables, which leads to a consistent density matrix. The resulting degree of decoherence is less than in the case of bosonic fields. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.