QED effective action at finite temperature

Abstract

The QED effective Lagrangian in the presence of an arbitrary constant electromagnetic background field at finite temperature is derived in the imaginary-time formalism to one-loop order. The boundary conditions in imaginary time reduce the set of gauge transformations of the background field, which allows for a further gauge invariant and puts restrictions on the choice of gauge. The additional invariant enters the effective action by a topological mechanism and can be identified with a chemical potential; it is furthermore related to Debye screening. In concordance with the real-time formalism, we do not find a thermal correction to Schwinger's pair-production formula. The calculation is performed on a maximally Lorentz covariant and gauge invariant stage.

9 pages, REVTeX, 1 figure, typos corrected, references added, final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (3)

• Light propagation in non-trivial QED vacua
• One-loop finite temperature effective action of QED in the worldline approach
• Thermally induced photon splitting

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