Nonequilibrium quantum electrodynamics: Entropy production during equilibration

Abstract

We study nonequilibrium processes of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) with relativistic charged Bose fields. The aim is to describe thermal equilibration, based on the Klein–Gordon equation for background coherent fields and the Kadanoff–Baym (KB) equation including the leading-order (LO) self-energy of the coupling expansion (the Hartree–Fock approximation). We introduce a gauge invariant relativistic kinetic entropy current at the first-order in the gradient expansion of the KB equation and we show the proof of the H-theorem in d + 1 dimensions (d = 1, 2, 3) in the presence of nonzero background coherent fields. Finally, we present numerical simulation in 1 + 1 dimensions and aim to investigate whether decoherence of the system occurs or not. We find that equilibrium states are realized with remaining background coherent charged Bose and photon fields by preparing distributions of incoherent charged particles asymmetrically in frequency mode as initial conditions in the KB equation even if LO self-energy is present.