In continuation of our earlier proposal for evaluating thermal effective actions, we determine the exact fermion propagator in 1+1 dimensional massive QED. This propagator is used to derive the finite temperature effective action of the theory which generates systematically all the one loop Feynman amplitudes calculated in thermal perturbation theory. Various aspects of the effective action including its imaginary part are discussed.
Using mass perturbation theory, we infer the bound-state spectrum of massive QED$_2$ and compute some decay widths of unstable bound states. Further, we discuss scattering processes, where all the resonances and particle production thresholds are properly taken into account by our methods.
We discuss a phase structure of compact QED in four dimensions by considering the theory as a perturbed topological model. In this scenario we use the singular configuration with an appropriate regularization, and so obtain the results similar to the lattice gauge theory due to the effect of topological objects. In this paper we calculate the thermal pressure of the topological model by the use of a one-dimensional Coulomb gas approximation, which leads to a phase structure of full compact QED. Furthermore the critical-line equation is explicitly evaluated. We also discuss relations between th…
Combining the thermal operator representation with the dispersion relation in QED at finite temperature and chemical potential, we determine the complete retarded photon self-energy only from its absorptive part at zero temperature. As an application of this method, we show that, even for the case of a nonzero chemical potential, the temperature dependent part of the one loop retarded photon self-energy vanishes in $(1+1)$ dimensional massless QED.
We present two compact derivations of the correct definition of the Chern-Simons term in the topologically non trivial context of thermal $QED_3$. One is based on a transgression descent from a D=4 background connection, the other on embedding the abelian model in SU(2). The results agree with earlier cohomology conclusions and can be also used to justify a recent simple heuristic approach. The correction to the naive Chern-Simons term, and its behavior under large gauge transformations are displayed.
The mean value of the one-loop energy-momentum tensor in thermal QED with electric-like background that creates particles from vacuum is calculated. The problem differes essentially from calculations of effective actions (similar to that of Heisenberg--Euler) in backgrounds that do not violate the stability of vacuum. The role of a constant electric background in the violation of both the stability of vacuum and the thermal character of particle distribution is investigated. Restrictions on the electric field and its duration under which one can neglect the back-reaction of created particles a…
Planar quantum electrodynamics, in presence of tree-level Chern-Simons term, is shown to support bound state excitations, with a threshold, not present for the pure Chern-Simons theory. In the present case, the bound state gets destabilized by vacuum fluctuations. The bound state itself finds justification in the duality of the theory with massive topological vector field. Thermal fluctuations further destabilize this state, leading to smooth dissociation at high temperatures. Physical systems are suggested for observing such a bound state.
It is shown that, by means of canonical operator approach, the Ward-Takahashi identity (WTI) at finite temperature $T$ and finite chemical potential $μ$ for complete vectorial vertex and complete fermion propagator can be simply proven, rigorously for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) and approximately for Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) where the ghost effect in the fermion sector is neglected. The WTI shown in the real-time thermal matrix form will give definite thermal constraints on the imaginary part of inverse complete Feynman propagator including self-energy for fermion and will play important…
Stueckelberg QED with massive photon is known to be renormalizable. But the limit of the mass going to zero is interesting because it brings the resolution to infrared questions through the role of Stueckelberg field at null infinity in addition to providing new asymptotic symmetries. Such symmetries facilitate the soft photon theorems also.
In this paper, we put forth a new massive spin-1 field theory. In contrast to the quantization of traditional vector field, the quantization of the new vector field is carried out in a natural way. The Lorentz invariance of the theory is discussed, where owing to an interesting feature of the new vector field, the Lorentz invariance has a special meaning. In term of formalism analogical to QED(i. e. spinor QED), we develop the quantum electrodynamics concerning the new spin-1 particles, say, vector QED, where the Feynman rules are given. The renormalizability of vector QED is manifest without …
In this work we discuss the effect of the quartic fermion self-interaction of Thirring type in QED in D=2 and D=3 dimensions. This is done through the computation of the effective action up to quadratic terms in the photon field. We analyze the corresponding nonlocal photon propagators nonperturbatively in % \frac{k}{m}, where k is the photon momentum and m the fermion mass. The poles of the propagators were determined numerically by using the Mathematica software. In D=2 there is always a massless pole whereas for strong enough Thirring coupling a massive pole may appear . For D=3 there are t…
We settle the ``apparent'' paradox present in thermal QED_3 that the perturbative series is not invariant, as manifested by the temperature dependence of the induced Chern-Simons term, by showing that large (unlike small) transformations and hence their Ward identities, are not perturbative order-preserving. Instead the thermal effective gauge field actions induced by charged fermions in QED_3 can be made invariant under both small and large gauge transformations by suitable regularization of the Dirac operator determinant, at the usual price of parity anomalies. Our result is illustrated by a…
We study the discrete and gauge symmetries of Quantum Electrodynamics at finite temperature within the real-time formalism. The gauge invariance of the complete generating functional leads to the finite temperature Ward identities. These Ward identities relate the eight vertex functions to the elements of the self-energy matrix. Combining the relations obtained from the $Z_2$ and the gauge symmetries of the theory we find that only one out of eight longitudinal vertex functions is independent. As a consequence of the Ward identities it is shown that some elements of the vertex function are sin…
We extend our previous analysis of gauge and Dirac fields in the presence of a chemical potential. We consider an alternate thermal operator which relates in a simple way the Feynman graphs in QED at finite temperature and charge density to those at zero temperature but non-zero chemical potential. Several interesting features of such a factorization are discussed in the context of the thermal photon and fermion self-energies.
We show that the high temperature behavior of non-commutative QED may be simply obtained from Boltzmann transport equations for classical particles. The transport equation for the charge neutral particle is shown to be characteristically different from that for the charged particle. These equations correctly generate, for arbitrary values of the non-commutative parameter theta, the leading, gauge independent hard thermal loops, arising from the fermion and the gauge sectors. We briefly discuss the generating functional of hard thermal amplitudes.
The semi-classical phase structure of two-dimensional QED and QCD are briefly reviewed. The non-abelian theory is reformulated to closely resemble the Schwinger model. It is shown that, contrary to the abelian theory, the phase structure of two-dimensional QCD is unaffected by the structure of the theta vacuum. We make parallel calculations in the two theories and conclude that massless Schwinger model is in the screening and the massive theory is in the confining phase, whereas both massless and massive QCD are in the screening phase.
We examine the parity violating terms generated by the box diagram in QED_3 at finite temperature. These lead to both extensive as well as non-extensive effective actions, which have very distinct behavior in the long wavelength and static limits. We discuss a large gauge Ward identity for the leading terms in the static limit, whose solution coincides with the effective action proposed earlier.
We compute the quark-antiquark potential in three dimensional massive Quantum Electrodynamics. The result indicates that screening prevails for large quark masses, contrary to the classical expectations. The classical result is reproduced for small separation of the quarks.
We have shown that self interaction effects in massive quantum electrodynamics can lead to the formation of bound states of quark antiquark pairs. A current-current fermion coupling term is introduced, which induces a well in the potential energy profile. Explicit expressions of the effective potential and renormalized parameters are provided.
There is chiral like symmetry for 4-component massless fermion in (2+1)-dimensional gauge theory.Since QED$_{3}$ with Chern-Simons term contains vortex solution for vector potential,one may expect vortex driven phase transition as Kosterlitz-Thouless type where chiral condensate is washed away at zero temperature.To study this possibility,we evaluate the fermion propagator by Dyson-Schwinger equation numerically and spectral function analytically in the Landau gauge.For quenched case we adopt Ball-Chiu vertex to keep gauge invariance of the results.The critical value of topological mass,above …
We obtain, through zeta function methods, the one-loop effective action for massive Dirac fields in the presence of a uniform, but otherwise general, electromagnetic background. After discussing renormalization, we compare our zeta function result with Schwinger's proper time approach.
Despite its simplicity, the unitary gauge is not a popular choice for practical loop calculations in gauge theories, due to the lack of off-shell renormalizability. We study the renormalization properties of the off-shell Green functions of the elementary electron fields in the massive QED, in order to elucidate the origin and structure of the extra ultraviolet divergences which exist only in the unitary gauge. We find that all these divergences affect the Green functions in a trivial way such that in coordinate space the off-shell Green functions are in fact multiplicatively renormalizable. T…
In this work quantum electrodynamics at T > 0 is considered. For this purpose we use thermo field dynamics and the causal approach to quantum field theory according to Epstein and Glaser, the latter being a rigorous method to avoid the well-known ultraviolet divergencies of quantum field theory. It will be shown that the theory is infrared divergent if the usual scattering states are used. The same is true if we use more general mixed states. This is in contradiction to the results established in the literature, and we will point out why these earlier approaches fail to describe the infrared b…
The spectrum of collective fermionic excitations in a finite temperature QED_{3+1} is studied in different regimes. It is shown that within the standard perturbation approach the one-loop dispersion equation, besides the ordinary one-particle excitation, has four new solutions. The additional excitations are gauge-dependent and two of them have nonphysical signs of residues in the propagator poles. The temperature evolution of the solutions is investigated and it is shown that the use of effective propagators leaves no more than one additional mode which becomes propagating at $T \bolpor 10M$,…
We investigate the effects of thermal fluctuations on the spontaneous magnetic condensate in three dimensional QED coupled with P-odd Dirac fermions. Our results show that the phenomenon of the spontaneous generation of the constant background magnetic field survives to the thermal corrections even at infinite temperature. We also study the thermal corrections to the fermionic condensate in presence of the magnetic field.
The one-loop vacuum polarization tensor is computed in QED with an external constant, homogeneous magnetic field at finite temperature. The Schwinger proper-time formalism is used and the computations are done in Euclidian space. The well-known results are recovered when the temperature and/or the magnetic field are switched off and the effect of the magnetic field on the Debye screening is discussed.
We calculate the effective action for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) in D=2,3 dimensions at the quadratic approximation in the gauge fields. We analyse the analytic structure of the corresponding nonlocal boson propagators nonperturbatively in k/m. In two dimensions for any nonzero fermion mass, we end up with one massless pole for the gauge boson . We also calculate in D=2 the effective potential between two static charges separated by a distance L and find it to be a linearly increasing function of L in agreement with the bosonized theory (massive Sine-Gordon model). In three dimensions we fi…
We review the one-loop effective action in scalar QED and the Schwinger effect in a uniform electric field in a two-dimensional (anti-) de Sitter space. The Schwinger effect has a thermal interpretation in terms of the effective temperature introduced by Cai and Kim. We propose a method to find the density of states for the charged scalar and obtain the QED action density and the pair-production rate in the in-out formalism.
To remove the linear infrared divergences in quenched approximation we include the massive fermion loop to the photon spectral function.Spectral function of fermion has no one particle singularity if we fix the anomalous dimension to be unity.In the case of $N$ flavour,$N$ dependence of order parameter is mild which may be due to screening effects.
The equilibrium size and temperature limits of thermally and chemically equilibrated $e^+e^-γ$ plasma drops are investigated at a given energy content. For a plasma to be equilibrated it must be opaque to electron and photon interactions. The opaqueness condition is determined by comparing plasma size with the mean free electron and photon paths. We calculate those paths using thermal Lorentz-invariant reaction rates for pair production and electron(positron) and photon scattering. The range of the corresponding plasma temperature and size is evaluated numerically. Considering the energy and s…
We investigate the Compton scattering vertex of charged scalars and photons in scalar quantum electrodynamics (SQED). We carry out its non perturbative construction consistent with Ward-Fradkin-Green-Takahashi identity (WFGTI) which relates 3-point vertices to the 4-point ones. There is an undetermined part which is transverse to one or both the external photons, and needs to be evaluated through perturbation theory. We present in detail how the transverse part at the 1-loop order can be evaluated for completely general kinematics of momenta involved in covariant gauges and dimensions. This in…
We study the radiative corrections to the Chern-Simons mass term at two loops in 2+1 dimensional quantum electrodynamics at finite temperature. We show that, in contrast to the behavior at zero temperature, thermal effects lead to a non vanishing contribution at this order. Using this result, as well as the large gauge Ward identity for the leading parity violating terms in the static limit, we determine the leading order parity violating effective action in this limit at two loops, which generalizes the one-loop effective action proposed earlier.
We compute the quark--antiquark potential in three dimensional massive Quantum Electrodynamics for arbitrary fermion mass. The result indicates that screening prevails for any quark masses, contrary to the classical expectations, generalizing our previous result obtained for large masses. We also test the validity of several approximation schemes using a detailed numerical analysis. The classical result is still reproduced for small separation of the quarks.
The finite-volume QED$_{1+1}$ is formulated in terms of Dirac variables by an explicit solution of the Gauss constraint with possible nontrivial boundary conditions taken into account. The intrinsic nontrivial topology of the gauge group is thus revealed together with its zero-mode residual dynamics. Topologically nontrivial gauge transformations generate collective excitations of the gauge field above Coleman's ground state, that are completely decoupled from local dynamics, the latter being equivalent to a free massive scalar field theory.
We study statistical properties of states of massive quantized charged Dirac and Klein-Gordon fields interacting with a background that violates the vacuum stability, first in general terms and then for a special electromagnetic background. As a starting point, we use a nonperturbative expression for the density operators of such fields derived by Gavrilov et al [S.P. Gavrilov, D.M. Gitman, and J.L. Tomazelli, Nucl. Phys. B 795, 645 (2008)]. We construct the reduced density operators for electron and positron subsystems and discuss a decoherence that may occur in the course of the evolution du…
Particle-antiparticle pairs can be produced by background electric fields via the Schwinger mechanism provided they are unconfined. If, as in QED in (3+1)-$d$ these particles are massive, the particle production rate is exponentially suppressed below a threshold field strength. Above this threshold, the energy for pair creation must come from the electric field itself which ought to eventually relax to the threshold strength. Calculating this relaxation in a self-consistent manner, however, is difficult. Chu and Vachaspati addressed this problem in the context of capacitor discharge in massles…
In the present work, we study different aspects of Lorentz and CPT symmetry violation in extended massless QED. By following the observation that the 2+1 dimensional Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory can be originated from the 3+1 dimensional Chern-Simons-like action, we also focus on the fermion sector to relate the 3+1 dimensional extended massless QED to 2+1 dimensional massive QED. We take advantage of this to state that the Chern-Simons-like action in extended massless QED can be induced with its coefficient being well defined and finite just as its 2+1 counterpart. We make use of three differe…
The parity-preserving $U_A(1)\times U_a(1)$ massive QED$_3$ is ultraviolet finiteness -- exhibits vanishing $β$-functions, associated to the gauge coupling constants (electric and pseudochiral charges) and the Chern-Simons mass parameter, and all the anomalous dimensions of the fields -- as well as is parity and gauge anomaly free at all orders in perturbation theory. The proof is independent of any regularization scheme and it is based on the quantum action principle in combination with general theorems of perturbative quantum field theory by adopting the Becchi-Rouet-Stora (BRS) algebraic re…
We derive the hard thermal loop action for soft electromagnetic fields in the finite temperature world-line formulation at imaginary time, by first integrating out the hard fermion modes from the microscopic QED action. Further, using the finite T world-line method, we calculate all static higher order terms in the soft electromagnetic field. At high T, the leading non-linear terms are independent of the temperature and, except for a term quartic in the time component of the vector potential, they cancel exactly against the vacuum contribution. The remaining T-dependent non-linear terms become…
For a (2+1)-dimensional topologically massive Born-Infeld theory, we compute the interaction potential within the structure of the gauge-invariant but path-dependent variables formalism. The result is equivalent to that of $QED_3$ with a Thirring interaction term among fermions, in the short distance regime.
We calculate the two-loop effective action of QED for arbitrary constant electromagnetic fields at finite temperature T in the limit of T much smaller than the electron mass. It is shown that in this regime the two-loop contribution always exceeds the influence of the one-loop part due to the thermal excitation of the internal photon. As an application, we study light propagation and photon splitting in the presence of a magnetic background field at low temperature. We furthermore discover a thermally induced contribution to pair production in electric fields.
The equivalence between thermal field theory and the Boltzmann transport equation is investigated at higher orders in the context of quantum electrodynamics. We compare the contributions obtained from the collisionless transport equation with the high temperature limit of the one-loop thermal Green's function. Our approach employs the representation of the thermal Green's functions in terms of forward scattering amplitudes. The general structure of these amplitudes clearly indicates that the physics described by the leading high temperature limit of quantum electrodynamics can be obtained from…
We advance a novel method for the finite-temperature effective action for nonequilibrium quantum fields and find the QED effective action in time-dependent electric fields, where charged pairs evolve out of equilibrium. The imaginary part of the effective action consists of thermal loops of the Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein distribution for the initial thermal ensemble weighted with factors for vacuum fluctuations. And the real part of the effective action is determined by the mean number of produced pairs, vacuum polarization, and thermal distribution. The mean number of produced pairs is equa…
In 2+1 dimensions, QED becomes exactly solvable for all values of the fermion charge $e$ in the limit of many fermions $N_f\gg 1$. We present results for the free energy density at finite temperature $T$ to next-to-leading-order in large $N_f$. In the naive large $N_f$ limit, we uncover an apparently UV-divergent contribution to the vacuum energy at order ${\cal O}(e^6 N_f^3)$, which we argue to become a finite contribution of order ${\cal O}(N_f^4 e^6)$ when resumming formally higher-order $1/N_f$ contributions. We find the finite-temperature free energy to be well-behaved for all values of t…
We calculate the free energy of a hot gas of electrons and photons to three loops using the hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory reorganization of finite-temperature perturbation theory. We calculate the free energy through three loops by expanding in a power series in m_D/T, m_f/T, and e^2, where m_D and m_f are thermal masses and e is the coupling constant. We demonstrate that the hard-thermal-loop perturbation reorganization improves the convergence of the successive approximations to the QED free energy at large coupling, e ~ 2. The reorganization is gauge invariant by construction, and d…
