We review the non-relativistic Green's-function approach to the kinetic equations for Fermi liquids far from equilibrium. The emphasis is on the consistent treatment of the off-shell motion between collisions and on the non-instant and non-local picture of binary collisions. The resulting kinetic equation is of the Boltzmann type, and it represents an interpolation between the theory of transport in metals and the theory of moderately dense gases. The free motion of particles is renormalised by various mean field and mass corrections in the spirit of Landau's quasiparticles in metals. The collisions are non-local in the spirit of Enskog's theory of non-ideal gases. The collisions are moreover non-instant, a feature which is absent in the theory of gases, but which is shown to be important for dense Fermi systems. In spite of its formal complexity, the presented theory has a simple implementation within the Monte-Carlo simulation schemes. Applications in nuclear physics are given for heavy-ion reactions and the results are compared with the former theory and recent experimental data. The effect of the off-shell motion and the non-local and non-instant collisions on the dynamics of the system can be characterised in terms of thermodynamic functions such as the energy density or the pressure tensor. Non-equilibrium counterparts of these functions and the corresponding balance equations are derived and discussed from two points of view. Firstly, they are used to prove the conservation laws. Secondly, the role of individual microscopic mechanisms in fluxes of particles and momenta and in transformations of the energy is clarified.
We review the non-relativistic Green's-function approach to the kinetic equations for Fermi liquids far from equilibrium. The emphasis is on the consistent treatment of the off-shell motion between collisions and on the non-instant and non-local picture of binary collisions. The resulting kinetic equation is of the Boltzmann type, and it represents an interpolation between the theory of transport in metals and the theory of moderately dense gases. The free motion of particles is renormalised by various mean field and mass corrections in the spirit of Landau's quasiparticles in metals. The collisions are non-local in the spirit of Enskog's theory of non-ideal gases. The collisions are moreover non-instant, a feature which is absent in the theory of gases, but which is shown to be important for dense Fermi systems. In spite of its formal complexity, the presented theory has a simple implementation within the Monte-Carlo simulation schemes. Applications in nuclear physics are given for heavy-ion reactions and the results are compared with the former theory and recent experimental data. The effect of the off-shell motion and the non-local and non-instant collisions on the dynamics of the system can be characterised in terms of thermodynamic functions such as the energy density or the pressure tensor. Non-equilibrium counterparts of these functions and the corresponding balance equations are derived and discussed from two points of view. Firstly, they are used to prove the conservation laws. Secondly, the role of individual microscopic mechanisms in fluxes of particles and momenta and in transformations of the energy is clarified.
This book presents an up-to-date formalism of non-equilibrium Green's functions covering different applications ranging from solid state physics, plasma physics, cold atoms in optical lattices up to relativistic transport and heavy ion collisions. Within the Green's function formalism, the basic sets of equations for these diverse systems are similar, and approximations developed in one field can be adapted to another field. The central object is the self-energy which includes all non-trivial aspects of the system dynamics. The focus is therefore on microscopic processes starting from elementary principles for classical gases and the complementary picture of a single quantum particle in a random potential. This provides an intuitive picture of the interaction of a particle with the medium formed by other particles, on which the Green's function is built on.
We investigate the potential of a quantum Boltzmann equation without momentum conservation, i.e., a kinetic equation for the local distribution function, for describing correlated electron systems out of equilibrium. The equation can be derived either for the dynamics of well-defined quasi- particles, neglecting the momentum conservation of the scattering in the spirit of dynamical mean field theory (DMFT), or, equivalently, as the quantum Boltzmann equation for the local occupied density of states in non-equilibrium DMFT. The approach may thus be applied even in cases where well-defined quasiparticles do not exist, with the main assumption that the spectral function remains rigid under the non-equilibrium evolution. We compare the result of the Boltzmann equation to non-equilibrium DMFT for the case of photo-carrier relaxation in Mott insulators, where processes on very different timescales emerge, i.e., impact ionization, intra-Hubbard-band thermalization, and full thermalization. Since the Boltzmann without momentum conservation is much simpler, it may allow us to simulate more complicated systems, whole devices, and much longer times.
A kinetic equation of nonlocal and noninstantaneous character unifies the achievements of transport in dense quantum gases with the Landau theory of quasiclassical transport in Fermi systems. Large cancellations in the off-shell motion appear, which are usually hidden in non-Markovian behaviors. The remaining corrections are expressed in terms of shifts in space and time that characterize the nonlocality of the scattering process. In this way, it is possible to recast quantum transport into a quasiclassical picture. In addition to the quasiparticle, the balance equations for density, momentum, energy, and entropy also include correlated two-particle contributions beyond the Landau theory. The medium effects on binary collisions are shown to mediate the latent heat, i.e., an energy conversion between correlation and thermal energy. For Maxwellian particles with time-dependent s-wave scattering, the correlated parts of the observables are calculated and a sign change of the latent heat is reported at a universal ratio of scattering length to the thermal de Broglie wavelength. This is interpreted as a change from correlational heating to cooling.
The phenomenological theory of a Fermi liquid is generalized to nonequilibrium conditions. Landau's theory is reformulated to include fluctuations of the distribution function and quasiparticle energy. The method of fluctuation in kinetic equations is used to establish the collision integral of the quasiparticle Boltzmann equation. This collision integral is expressed in terms of the parameters of Landau's theory, and includes dynamic screening effects. The results are compared with recent theories of transport in Fermi liquids.
This article is the second of a series where we propose a theory of the dynamics of quantum gases with a precise treatment of the short range two body correlations. For this purpose, we use a variant of the Wigner transform, the "free transform" , which has a useful property in this context: if, before collision, two particles are uncorrelated, the incoming part of the free Wigner transform remains always exactly factorized. Therefore, instead of asssuming a factorization of the two particle distribution, it is less restrictive to make a similar assumption on the free transform. Time symmetry is broken when the correlations of the outgoing part of the free transform are ignored; this approximation, which is well in the spirit of Boltzmann, amounts to considering successive collisions as independent processes (the correlations present in the outgoing part could play a role if the same particles rapidly collided again, an unlikely event in dilute gases). Therefore, the succession of collisions is not treated exactly, but each collision is, even during interaction. One then obtains a closed set of equations which leads directly to a kinetic equation for the free distribution $ f $. The equation includes retardation and quantum refraction effects, and provides a generalization of the Boltzmann equation. The reconstruction of the two particle distribution function $ f_{II} $ from $ f $ reintroduces the effects of short range correlations and, more generally, gives the values of all one particle and two particle physical observables. The price to pay for not using the usual one particle distribution is that the relation between the local physical quantities (density of particles, energy density, etc.) becomes more complicated than in the usual theory, and includes terms which are non linear in $ f $. We nevertheless show how this formalism automatically satisfies the local conservation of all hydrodynamic quantities: particle, momentum and energy densities. The pressure tensor includes quadratic terms which correspond to second virial corrections. The temperature of the gas is defined from the kinetic energy of the particles when they are far apart from each other. We finally briefly discuss the connections of this formalism with the classical Enskog theory, or mean field type theories such as the Landau theory (in particular, we note the presence of recoil effects in the "molecular field")
In this thesis, we discussed the derivation of quantum kinetic equations appropriate for applications in nuclear physics, both in a non-relativistic and in a relativistic context. In each case we obtained a kinetic equation together with an equation for the effective interaction. The latter serves as the dynamical input of the former. In the kinetic equation both mean-field and collision effects are described in a self-consistent way because both are expressed in terms of the effective interaction. This self-consistency enforces us to solve a statistical problem (kinetic equation) and a dynamical problem (effective interaction) simultaneously. The interaction, that we obtained as a result of our considerations, is a generalized version of the usual Brueckner G-matrix in the sense that single-particle energies are corrected for collision effects by the so called rearrangement-term. 0nly in this way kinetic theory and interaction are consistent with one another and therefore constitute a conserving approximation.... Zie epilogue