Nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum fields

We review recent developments and open questions for the description of nonequilibrium quantum fields, continuing hep-ph/0302210 and hep-ph/0410330.

It is shown that the timelike asymptotic properties of thermal correlation functions in relativistic quantum field theory can consistently be described in terms of free fields carrying some stochastic degree of freedom which couples to the thermal background. These ``asymptotic thermal fields'' have specific algebraic properties (commutation relations) and their dynamics can be expressed in terms of asymptotic field equations. The formalism is applied to interacting theories ...

On the basis of the equivalence of the energy balance deacription at micro- and macro-level we propose a quantum generalization of the viscous friction law for a macroscopic Langevin equation describing thermal fluctuations without the zero point contribution. This equation recovers the classical case in the limit h -> 0. In particular it satisfies the quantum regression theorem and resolves several anomalies appearing in the quantum extension of the fluctuation dissipation t...

Coarse-grained Langevin-type effective field equations are derived for classical systems of particles. These equations include the effects of thermal fluctuation and dissipation which may arise from coupling to an external bath, as in the Brownian motion of a single particle, or which may arise from statistical fluctuations in small parts of an isolated many-particle system, as in sound waves. These equations may provide some guidance for the analysis of mesoscopic or microsc...

Quantum dissipation arises when a large system can be split in a quantum system and an environment where the energy of the former flows to. Understanding the effect of dissipation on quantum many-body systems is of particular importance due to its potential relations with quantum information processing. We propose a conceptually simple approach to introduce the dissipation into interacting quantum systems in a thermodynamical context, in which every site of a 1d lattice is co...

We consider the out-of-equilibrium evolution of a classical condensate field and its quantum fluctuations for a scalar O(N) model with spontaneously broken symmetry. In contrast to previous studies we do not consider the large N limit, but the case of finite N, including N=1, i.e., plain $\lambda \phi^ 4$ theory. The instabilities encountered in the one-loop approximation are prevented, as in the large-N limit, by back reaction of the fluctuations on themselves, or, equivalen...

We investigate the out-of-equilibrium evolution of a classical background field and its quantum fluctuations in the scalar O(N) model with spontaneous symmetry breaking. We consider the 2-loop 2PI effective action in the Hartree approximation, i.e., including bubble resummation but without non-local contributions to the Dyson-Schwinger equation. We concentrate on the (nonequilibrium) phase structure of the model and observe a first-order transition between a spontaneously bro...

We derive the nonequilibrium real-time evolution of an O(N) - invariant scalar quantum field theory in the presence of a nonvanishing expectation value of the quantum field. Using a systematic 1/N expansion of the 2PI effective action to next-to-leading order, we obtain nonperturbative evolution equations which include scattering and memory effects. The equivalence of the direct method, which requires the resummation of an infinite number of skeleton diagrams, with the auxili...

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in quantum field theories at non-zero temperature still holds fundamental open questions, in particular what happens to vacuum Goldstone bosons when the temperature is increased. By investigating a complex scalar field theory on the lattice we demonstrate that Goldstone bosons at non-zero temperature behave like screened massless particle-like excitations, so-called thermoparticles, which continue to exist even in the symmetry-restored phase of t...

Using a generalized Langevin equation of motion, quantum ballistic thermal transport is obtained from classical molecular dynamics. This is possible because the heat baths are represented by random noises obeying quantum Bose-Einstein statistics. The numerical method gives asymptotically exact results in both the low-temperature ballistic transport regime and high-temperature strongly nonlinear classical regime. The method can be thought of as a semi-classical approximation t...