Time-dependent quantum Green's functions
William C. Schieve, Lawrence Paul Horwitz
Introduction Mathematically, given a linear differential operator L x , one encounters the solution to the inhomogeneous differential equation Here ρ ( x ) is a given source function. For a given boundary condition, we assume a solution to exist. The solution can be reduced to a simpler problem. Let G ( x, y ) is the Green's function. This is a function of x with y a parameter. Take G ( x, y ) to satisfy the same boundary conditions as φ ( x ). Then since An example of L x is, of course, the Schrödinger operator We take ρ ( x ) = V ( x ) ψ ( x , t ), ψ ( x , t ) being the wave function and V ( x ) the potential operator. We are interested in Green's functions taken over from the techniques of quantum field theory (Schweber, 1961; Lifshitz and Petaevskii, 1981). We will concern ourselves particularly with one- and two-time Green's functions, since our principal interest is to show a connection to the calculations of linear response theory (Chapter 15) as well as to quantum kinetic equations. Then we wish to compare the methods with those described in Chapter 4. In this we will follow the work of L. P. Kadanoff and G. Baym (1962) and of L. V. Keldysh (1965) and also Zubarev (1974). We will not discuss equilibrium statistical mechanics utilizing Green's function techniques for many-body problems. The literature is exhaustive (see Abrikosov et al. , 1963; Fetter and Walecka, 1971). A good general introduction is the book by G. D. Mahan (2000). One- and two-time quantum Green's functions and their properties Let us introduce the creation operator ψ † ( r, t ) and annihilation operator ψ ( r, t ) of the second quantization formalism (see Schweber, 1961). They have the equal time commutation rules for Bose and Fermi particles: The Hamiltonian operator for the particles is and the number density of particles at r t is the operator Note that r = ( r 1 … r N ) for (1, 2, 3, …, N ) and V (| r − r ′|) is the pair potential depending, as in Chapter 4, on the scalar distance between the particles.
Cambridge University Press eBooks•Apr 16, 2009•0 citations