Flavour-coherent propagators and Feynman rules: covariant cQPA formulation

Abstract

We present a simplified and generalized derivation of the flavour-coherent propagators and Feynman rules for the fermionic kinetic theory based on coherent quasiparticle approximation (cQPA) [1–7]. The new formulation immediately reveals the composite nature of the cQPA Wightman function as a product of two spectral functions and an effective two-point interaction vertex, which contains all quantum statistical and coherence information. We extend our previous work to the case of nonzero dispersive self-energy, which leads to a broader range of applications. By this scheme, we derive flavoured kinetic equations for local 2-point functions $$ S_{\text{k}}^{{ <, > }} $$ (t, t), which are reminiscent of the equations of motion for the density matrix. We emphasize that in our approach all the interaction terms are derived from first principles of nonequilibrium quantum field theory.