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Journal of Mathematical Physics

Transcendental equations in the Schwinger-Keldysh nonequilibrium theory and nonvanishing correlations

Filippo Giraldi

Published Sep 1, 2015• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Schwinger-Keldysh nonequilibrium theory allows the description of various transport phenomena involving bosons (fermions) embedded in bosonic (fermionic) environments. The retarded Green’s function obeys the Dyson equation and determines via its non-vanishing asymptotic behavior the dissipationless open dynamics. The appearance of this regime is conditioned by the existence of the solution of a general class of transcendental equations in complex domain that we study. Particular cases consist in transcendental equations containing exponential, hyperbolic, power law, logarithmic, and special functions. The present analysis provides an analytical description of the thermal and temporal correlation function of two general observables of a quantum system in terms of the corresponding spectral function. Special integral properties of the spectral function guarantee non-vanishing asymptotic behavior of the correlation function.

DOI
10.1063/1.4930558

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The Schwinger-Keldysh nonequilibrium theory allows the description of various transport phenomena involving bosons (fermions) embedded in bosonic (fermionic) environments. The retarded Green’s function obeys the Dyson equation and determines via its non-vanishing asymptotic behavior the dissipationless open dynamics. The appearance of this regime is conditioned by the existence of the solution of a general class of transcendental equations in complex domain that we study. Particular cases consist in transcendental equations containing exponential, hyperbolic, power law, logarithmic, and special functions. The present analysis provides an analytical description of the thermal and temporal correlation function of two general observables of a quantum system in terms of the corresponding spectral function. Special integral properties of the spectral function guarantee non-vanishing asymptotic behavior of the correlation function.
The Born-Markov approximation is widely used to study the dynamics of open quantum systems coupled to external baths. Using Keldysh formalism, we show that the dynamics of a system of bosons (fermions) linearly coupled to a noninteracting bosonic (fermionic) bath falls outside this paradigm if the bath spectral function has nonanalyticities as a function of frequency. In this case, we show that the dissipative and noise kernels governing the dynamics have distinct power-law tails. The Green's functions show a short-time ``quasi''-Markovian exponential decay before crossing over to a power-law tail governed by the nonanalyticity of the spectral function. We study a system of bosons (fermions) hopping on a one-dimensional lattice, where each site is coupled linearly to an independent bath of noninteracting bosons (fermions). We obtain exact expressions for the Green's functions of this system, which show power-law decay $\ensuremath{\sim}|t\ensuremath{-}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}{|}^{\ensuremath{-}3/2}$. We use these to calculate the density and current profile, as well as unequal-time current-current correlators. While the density and current profiles show interesting quantitative deviations from Markovian results, the current-current correlators show qualitatively distinct long-time power-law tails $|t\ensuremath{-}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}{|}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ characteristic of non-Markovian dynamics. We show that the power-law decays survive in the presence of interparticle interaction in the system, but the crossover time scale is shifted to larger values with increasing interaction strength.
We present a general theory of non-Markovian dynamics for open systems of noninteracting fermions (bosons) linearly coupled to thermal environments of noninteracting fermions (bosons). We explore the non-Markovian dynamics by connecting the exact master equations with the nonequilibirum Green's functions. Environmental backactions are fully taken into account. The non-Markovian dynamics consists of nonexponential decays and dissipationless oscillations. Nonexponential decays are induced by the discontinuity in the imaginary part of the self-energy corrections. Dissipationless oscillations arise from band gaps or the finite band structure of spectral densities. The exact analytic solutions for various non-Markovian thermal environments show that non-Markovian dynamics can be largely understood from the environmental-modified spectra of open systems.
Schwinger Keldysh field theory is a widely used paradigm to study nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems starting from a thermal state. We extend this formalism to describe nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum systems starting from arbitrary initial many-body density matrices. We show how this can be done for both bosons and fermions, and for both closed and open quantum systems, using additional sources coupled to bilinears of the fields at the initial time, calculating Green's functions in a theory with these sources, and then taking appropriate set of derivatives of these Green's functions with respect to initial sources to obtain physical observables. The set of derivatives depends on the initial density matrix. The physical correlators in a dynamics with arbitrary initial conditions do not satisfy Wick's theorem, even for noninteracting systems. However, our formalism constructs intermediate ``$n\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{particle}$ Green's functions'' that obey Wick's theorem and provide a prescription to obtain physical correlation functions from them. This allows us to obtain analytic answers for all physical many-body correlation functions of a noninteracting system even when it is initialized to an arbitrary density matrix. We use these exact expressions to obtain an estimate of the violation of Wick's theorem and relate it to presence of connected multiparticle initial correlations in the system. We illustrate this new formalism by calculating density and current profiles in many-body fermionic and bosonic open quantum systems initialized to nontrivial density matrices. We have also shown how this formalism can be extended to interacting many-body systems.
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The increasing interest in nonequilibrium effects in condensed matter theory motivates the adaption of diverse equilibrium techniques to Keldysh formalism. For methods based on multi-particle Green's or vertex functions, this involves a detailed knowledge of the real-time properties of those functions. In this review, we derive general properties of fermionic and bosonic multi-particle Green's and vertex functions for a stationary state described within Keldysh formalism. Special emphasis is put on the analytic properties associated with causality and on a detailed discussion of the Kubo–Martin–Schwinger conditions which characterize thermal equilibrium. Finally we describe how diagrammatic approximations and approximations within the functional renormalization group approach respect these properties.