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International Journal of Modern Physics A

A UNIFIED FORMALISM OF THERMAL QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

H. Chu, Hiroomi Umezawa

Published Jun 10, 1994• 57 citations

Abstract

We present a comprehensive review of the most fundamental and practical aspects of thermo-field dynamics (TFD), including some of the most recent developments in the field. To make TFD fully consistent, some suitable changes in the structure of the thermal doublets and the Bogoliubov transformation matrices have been made. A close comparison between TFD and the Schwinger-Keldysh closed time path formalism (SKF) is presented. We find that TFD and SKF are in many ways the same in form; in particular, the two approaches are identical in stationary situations. However, TFD and SKF are quite different in time-dependent nonequilibrium situations. The main source of this difference is that the time evolution of the density matrix itself is ignored in SKF while in TFD it is replaced by a time-dependent Bogoliubov transformation. In this sense TFD is a better candidate for time-dependent quantum field theory. Even in equilibrium situations, TFD has some remarkable advantages over the Matsubara approach and SKF, the most notable being the Feynman diagram recipes, which we will present. We will show that the calculations of two-point functions are simplified, instead of being complicated, by the matrix nature of the formalism. We will present some explicit calculations using TFD, including space-time inhomogeneous situations and the vacuum polarization in equilibrium relativistic QED.

DOI: 10.1142/s0217751x94000960

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The renormalization scheme in nonequilibrium thermal quantum field theories is reexamined. Instead of the self-energy diagonalization scheme, we propose to diagonalize Green’s function at equal time. This eliminates the problem of on-shell definition related to time-dependent energies and spatially inhomogeneous situations, and yields a Boltzmann equation that contains memory effect. The new diagonalization scheme and the derivation of the Boltzmann equation from it can be applied to any thermal situation. It allows the treatment of a nonequilibrium problem beyond perturbational calculations in a self-consistent manner. The results are applicable to both thermo field dynamics and the closed time path formalism.

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This paper is a review on the structure of thermo field dynamics (TFD) in which the basic concepts such as the thermal doublets, the quasi-particles and the self-consistent renormalization are presented in detail. A strong emphasis is put on the computational scheme. A detailed structure of this scheme is illustrated by the one-loop calculation in a non-equilibrium time-dependent process. A detailed account of the one-loop calculation has never been reported anywhere. The role of the self-consistent renormalization is explained. The equilibrium TFD is obtained as the long-time limit of non-equilibrium TFD.

Thermofield Dynamics (TFD), a real time formalism for thermal quantum field theory, is formulated in terms of a path-integral approach following the Weinberg procedure.In order to assure precise rules for the development, we use a representation of Lie-algebras such that the TFD algebraic ingredients are derived, including the tilde conjugation rules.The association with the canonical formalism is obtained, and for the case of bosons, we introduce the Feynman diagrams and derive the n-point functions.