Effective actions at finite temperature

Abstract

This is a more detailed version of our recent paper where we proposed, from first principles, a direct method for evaluating the exact fermion propagator in the presence of a general background field at finite temperature. This can, in turn, be used to determine the finite temperature effective action for the system. As applications, we discuss the complete one loop finite temperature effective actions for 0+1 dimensional QED as well as for the Schwinger model in detail. 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. Various other aspects of the problem are also discussed in detail.

9 pages, revtex, 1 figure, references added

References in corpus (5)

• Finite Temperature Effective Actions
• 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 (8)

• Nonperturbative QED Effective Action at Finite Temperature
• Infrared chiral anomaly at finite temperature
• Effective Electromagnetic Lagrangian at Finite Temperature and Density in the Electroweak Model
• The thermal chiral anomaly in the Schwinger model
• Thermal effective action for 1+1 dimensional massive QED
• The Pauli-Villars regularised free energy of Dirac's vacuum in purely magnetic fields
• Causal amplitudes in the Schwinger model at finite temperature
• Fermion propagator in an external potential and generalized Airy functions