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arXiv:hep-ph/9605438 · Physics Essays

Quantum Fields and Dissipation

Peter A. Henning

Published Dec 1, 1996• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The description of thermal or non-equilibrium systems necessitates a quantum field theory which differs from the usual approach in two aspects: 1.The Hilbert space is doubled; 2.Stable quasi-particles do not exist in interacting systems. A mini-review of these two aspects is given from a practical viewpoint including two applications. For thermal states it is shown how infrared divergences occuring in perturbative quasi-particle theories are avoided, whereas for non-equilibrium states a memory effect is shown to arise in the thermalization.

DOI
10.4006/1.3029272

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The description of thermal or non-equilibrium systems necessitates a quantum field theory which differs from the usual approach in two aspects: 1.The Hilbert space is doubled; 2.Stable quasi-particles do not exist in interacting systems. A mini-review of these two aspects is given from a practical viewpoint including two applications. For thermal states it is shown how infrared divergences occuring in perturbative quasi-particle theories are avoided, whereas for non-equilibrium states a memory effect is shown to arise in the thermalization.
A fundamental framework for the construction of a quantum field theory for open systems, which will be called non-equilibrium thermo field dynamics (NETFD), is built upon two concepts. One is the thermal state in the thermal-Liouville space, by which the quasi-particle superoperator is introduced generally from the thermal state condition. The other is the coarse graining which is realized by projecting out some partial space from the complete thermal-Liouville space, and by which the dissipation is introduced. Most properties of the usual quantum field theory (e.g., the operator formalism, the time-ordered formulation of the Green’s functions, the Feynman diagram method in real time, etc.) are preserved in NETFD. The entropy for the nonequilibrium state can be also introduced in NETFD.
Quantum dissipation involves both energy relaxation and decoherence, leading toward quantum thermal equilibrium. There are several theoretical prescriptions of quantum dissipation but none of them is simple enough to be treated exactly in real applications. As a result, formulations in different prescriptions are practically used with different approximation schemes. This review examines both theoretical and application aspects on various perturbative formulations, especially those that are exact up to second-order but nonequivalent in high-order system-bath coupling contributions. Discrimination is made in favor of an unconventional formulation that in a sense combines the merits of both the conventional time-local and memory-kernel prescriptions, where the latter is least favorite in terms of the applicability range of parameters for system-bath coupling, non-Markovian, and temperature. Also highlighted is the importance of correlated driving and dissipation effects, not only on the dynamics under strong external field driving, but also in the calculation of field-free correlation and response functions.
This paper has two aims: to provide a physical background of thermo field dynamics (TFD) and to present a review of the recent development of TFD. Macroscopic and thermal phenomena are considered from the unified viewpoint of microscopic quantum field theory. The concepts in quantum field theory such as renormalization and quasi-particles force us to take account of the time-dependence of the trace sum which has been ignored in the usual treatment of thermal situation. It is within this context that we review TFD. The applications of TFD to time-dependent non-equilibrium phenomena (the reservoir model and the self-interacting field model), show that we can obtain the master equation as well as the dissipative coefficient from the self-consistent renormalization condition. At the same time it is also shown that the final Gibbs distribution and the temperature can be derived, which implies that we obtain the equilibrium theory from the non-equilibrium one at the long-time limit.
It is well known that physical particles are thermally dissipative at finite temperature. In this paper we reformulate both the equilibrium and nonequilibrium thermal field theories in terms of stable quasiparticles. We will redefine the thermal doublets, the double tilde conjugation rules and the thermal Bogoliubov transformations so that our theory can be consistent for most general situations. All operators, including the dissipative physical particle operators, are realized in a Fock space defined by the stable quasiparticles. The propagators of the physical particles are expressed in terms of the operators of such stable quasiparticles, which is a simple diagonal matrix with the diagonal elements being the temporal step functions, same as the propagators in the usual quantum field theory without thermal degrees of freedom. The proper self-energies are also expressed in terms of these stable quasiparticle propagators. This formalism inherits the definition of on-shell self-energy in the usual quantum field theory. With this definition, a self-consistent renormalization is formulated which leads to quantum Boltzmann equation and the entropy law. With the aid of a doublet vector algebra we have an extremely simple recipe for computing Feynman diagrams. We apply this recipe to several examples of equilibrium and nonequilibrium two-point functions, and to the kinetic equation for the particle numbers.
Conventional transport theory is not really applicable to non-equilibrium systems which exhibit strong quantum effects. We present two different approaches to overcome this problem. Firstly we point out how transport equations may be derived that incorporate a nontrivial spectral function as a typical quantum effect, and test this approach in a toy model of a strongly interacting degenerate plasma. Secondly we explore a path to include non-equilibrium effects into quantum field theory through momentum mixing transformations in Fock space. Although the two approaches are completely orthogonal, they lead to the same coherent conclusion. Dedicated to the memory of Hiroomi Umezawa, Friend and mentor, Who had the vision to unify Quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. GSI-Preprint 95-69 Invited contribution to the Umezawa Memorial Volume of Int.J.Mod.Phys. B
Recent experimental advances in ultrafast phenomena have triggered renewed interest in the dynamics of correlated quantum systems away from equilibrium. We review nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory studies of both the transient and the steady states of a DC field-driven correlated quantum system. In particular, we focus on the nonequilibrium behavior and how it relates to the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. The fluctuation-dissipation theorem emerges as an indicator for how the system thermalizes and for how it reaches a steady state. When the system thermalizes in an infinite temperature steady state it can pass through a succession of quasi-thermal states that approximately obey the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. We also discuss the Wigner distribution and what its evolution tells us about the nonequilibrium many-body problem.