Finite Temperature Effective Actions

Abstract

We present, from first principles, a direct method for evaluating the exact fermion propagator in the presence of a general background field at finite temperature, which can be used to determine the finite temperature effective action for the system. As applications, we determine the complete one loop finite temperature effective actions for 0+1 dimensional QED as well as the Schwinger model. These effective actions, which are derived in the real time (closed time path) formalism, generate systematically all the Feynman amplitudes calculated in thermal perturbation theory and also show that the retarded (advanced) amplitudes vanish in these theories.

5 pages, revtex, typos fixed, references added, to be published in Physics Letters B

References in corpus (4)

• Thermal Operator Representation of Finite Temperature Graphs II
• Factorization of finite temperature graphs in thermal QED
• Hard thermal effective actions in the Schwinger formulation
• Exact Effective action for (1+1)-dimensional fermions in an Abelian background at finite temperature and chemical potential

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Nonperturbative QED Effective Action at Finite Temperature
• Critical Dimension and Negative Specific Heat in One-dimensional Large-N Reduced Models
• Multiple phases and meromorphic deformations of unitary matrix models
• Effective actions at finite temperature
• Tidal excitation as mixing in thermal CFT
• Infrared chiral anomaly at finite temperature
• The thermal chiral anomaly in the Schwinger model
• Thermal effective action for 1+1 dimensional massive QED
• Effective Electromagnetic Lagrangian at Finite Temperature and Density in the Electroweak Model
• Causal amplitudes in the Schwinger model at finite temperature
• Proper time method in de Sitter space
• Fermion propagator in an external potential and generalized Airy functions