The Barton Expansion and the Path Integral Approach in Thermal Field Theory

Abstract

It has been shown how on-shell forward scattering amplitudes (the ``Barton expansion'') and quantum mechanical path integral (QMPI) can both be used to compute temperature dependent effects in thermal field theory. We demonstrate the equivalence of these two approaches and then apply the QMPI to compute the high temperature expansion for the four-point function in QED, obtaining results consistent with those previously obtained from the Barton expansion.

16 pages, ReVTeX

References in corpus (5)

• Thermal Green's Functions from Quantum Mechanical Path Integrals
• Thermal Green's Functions from Quantum Mechanical Path Integrals II: Inclusion of Fermions
• Nonlinear interaction between electromagnetic fields at high temperature
• Non-linear electromagnetic interactions in thermal QED
• GENERALIZED THERMAL ZETA-FUNCTIONS

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Hard Thermal Loops and Beyond in the Finite Temperature World-Line Formulation of QED
• Hard thermal effective actions in the Schwinger formulation
• Finite temperature gluon self-energy in a class of temporal gauges