Kinetic transport theory with quantum coherence

✍ Scribed by Matti Herranen; Kimmo Kainulainen; Pyry M. Rahkila

• Book ID: 104070585
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 307 KB
• Volume: 820
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0375-9474
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2009.01.050

✦ Synopsis

We derive transport equations for fermions and bosons in spatially or temporally varying backgrounds with special symmetries, by use of the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. In a noninteracting theory the coherence information is shown to be encoded in new singular shells for the 2-point function. Imposing this phase space structure to the interacting theory leads to a a self-consistent equation of motion for a physcial density matrix, including coherence and a well defined collision integral. The method is applied e.g. to demonstrate how an initially coherent out-of-equlibrium state approaches equlibrium through decoherence and thermalization.