Schwinger–Keldysh Formalism

Perry R. Rice

H. Chu, Hiroomi Umezawa

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.

van Leeuwen, R., Dahlen, N.E., Stefanucci, Gianluca +2 more

Felix M. Haehl, Mukund Rangamani

These notes provide an overview of real-time techniques in quantum field theories and holography. We outline the general rationale and principles underlying the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism and its out-of-time-order generalizations. To illustrate its broad utility we frame our discussion in the language of open quantum dynamics. As a specific application we describe how such real-time observables help in understanding scrambling dynamics. We also describe the holographic prescription for computing thermal Schwinger-Keldysh observables. These notes are based on a series of lectures held during the S-Matrix Marathon workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study on 11-22 March 2024.

Robert van Leeuwen, Nils Erik Dahlen, Gianluca Stefanucci +2 more

Masaru Hongo, Suro Kim, Toshifumi Noumi +1 more

Abstract We develop the effective field theoretical (EFT) approach to time-translational symmetry breaking of nonequilibrium open systems based on the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. In the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism, all the symmetries of the microscopic Lagrangian are doubled essentially because the dynamical fields are doubled to describe the time-evolution along the closed-time-path. The effective Lagrangian for open systems are then obtained by coarse-graining the microscopic Schwinger-Keldysh Lagrangian. As a consequence of coarse-graining procedure, there appear the noise and dissipation effects, which explicitly break the doubled time-translational symmetries into a diagonal one. We therefore need to incorporate this symmetry structure to construct the EFT for Nambu-Goldstone bosons in symmetry broken phases of open systems. Based on this observation together with the consistency of the Schwinger-Keldysh action, we construct and study the general EFT for time-translational symmetry breaking in particular, having in mind applications to synchronization, time crystal, and cosmic inflation.