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arXiv:0710.5652 · Birkhäuser Basel eBooks

The Structure of Green Functions in Quantum Field Theory with a General State

Christian Brouder

Published Jan 1, 2009• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In quantum field theory the Green function is usually calculated as the expectation value of the time-ordered product of fields over the vacuum. In some cases, especially in degenerate systems, expectation values over general states are required. The corresponding Green functions are essentially more complex than in the vacuum, because they cannot be written in terms of standard Feynman diagrams. Here a method is proposed to determine the structure of these Green functions and to derive nonperturbative equations for them. The main idea is to transform the cumulants describing correlations into interaction terms.

DOI
10.1007/978-3-7643-8736-5_10

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In quantum field theory the Green function is usually calculated as the expectation value of the time-ordered product of fields over the vacuum. In some cases, especially in degenerate systems, expectation values over general states are required. The corresponding Green functions are essentially more complex than in the vacuum, because they cannot be written in terms of standard Feynman diagrams. Here a method is proposed to determine the structure of these Green functions and to derive nonperturbative equations for them. The main idea is to transform the cumulants describing correlations into interaction terms.
In quantum field theory (QFT), the vacuum expectation value of a normal product of creation and annihilation operators is always zero. This simple property paves the way to the classical treatment of perturbative QFT. This is no longer the case in the presence of initial correlations, that is if the vacuum is replaced by a general state. As a consequence, the combinatorics of correlated systems such as the ones occurring in many-body physics is more complex than that of quantum field theory and the general theory has made very slow progress. Similar observations hold in statistical physics or quantum probability for the perturbation series arising from the study of non Gaussian measures. In this work, an analysis of the Hopf algebraic aspects of quantum field theory is used to derive the structure of Green functions in terms of connected and one-particle irreducible Greeen functions for perturbative QFT in the presence of initial correlations.
In the quantum field theory with the vacuum being the ground state the Green functions are the vacuum expectation values of the chronological, retarded or advanced products of the field operators (Bjoken & Drell, 1964; Itzykson & Zuber, 1985; Peskin & Schroeder, 1995). They are the generalized functions of the real time variables ti (and also other spatial coordinates). For the application of the Green function technique to the study of the timeindependent phenomena in equilibrium many-body systems at a finite temperature, the Matsubara imaginary time Green functions were introduced and widely used (Abrikosov et al., 1975; Bruuns & Flensberg, 2004; Haken, 1976). They are the mean values over a statistical ensemble at a finite temperature of the chronological products of the imaginary timedependent operators. Both these types of Green functions are inadequate for the application to the study of the time-dependent phenomena in the many-body systems with a finite density and at a finite temperature, in particular the non-equilibrium systems. For the application to the study of the time-dependent dynamical processes in non-equilibrium many-body systems Keldysh (Keldysh, 1965) has introduced a more general class of timedependent Green functions at finite temperature and density. They are the mean values of the time-ordered products of quantum operators in the Heisenberg picture over statistical ensembles of many-body systems with finite densities and at finite temperatures (which may be non-vanishing). The simplest example is the two-point Green function
The many-body theory of degenerate systems is described in detail. More generally, this theory applies to systems with an initial state that cannot be described by a single Slater determinant. The double-source (or closed-time-path) formalism of nonequilibrium quantum field theory is used to derive an expression for the average value of a product of interacting fields when the initial state is not the vacuum or a Slater determinant. Quantum group techniques are applied to derive the hierarchy of unconnected Green functions and the hierarchy of connected ones.
When one tries to take into account the nontrivial vacuum structure of quantum field theory, the standard functional-integral tools, such as generating functionals or transitional amplitudes, are often quite inadequate for such purposes. Here we propose a generalized generating functional for Green's functions which allows one to easily distinguish among a continuous set of vacua that are mutually connected via unitary canonical transformations. In order to keep our discussion as simple as possible, we limit ourselves to quantum mechanics where the generating functional of Green's functions is constructed by means of phase-space path integrals. The quantum-mechanical setting allows us to accentuate the main logical steps involved without embarking on technical complications such as renormalization or inequivalent representations that should otherwise be addressed in the full-fledged quantum field theory. We illustrate the inner workings of the generating functional obtained by discussing Green's functions among vacua that are mutually connected via translations and dilatations. Salient issues, including connection with quantum field theory, vacuum-to-vacuum transition amplitudes, and perturbation expansion in the vacuum parameter, are also briefly discussed.
We extend the self-consistent Green's functions formalism to take into account three-body interactions. We analyze the perturbative expansion in terms of Feynman diagrams and define effective one- and two-body interactions, which allows for a substantial reduction of the number of diagrams. The procedure can be taken as a generalization of the normal ordering of the Hamiltonian to fully correlated density matrices. We give examples up to third order in perturbation theory. To define nonperturbative approximations, we extend the equation-of-motion method in the presence of three-body interactions. We propose schemes that can provide nonperturbative resummation of three-body interactions. We also discuss two different extensions of the Koltun sum rule to compute the ground state of a many-body system.