Thermal Equilibrium in a General Gravitational Field

Thermal Equilibrium in a General Gravitational Field.

Non-equilibrium Dynamics of a Thermal Plasma in a Gravitational Field

We introduce functional methods to study the non-equilibrium dynamics of a quantum massless scalar field at finite temperature in a gravitational field. We calculate the close time path (CTP) effective action and, using its formal equivalence with the influence functional, derive the noise and dissipation kernels of the quantum open system in terms of quantities in thermodynamical equilibrium. ...

Thermal Field Theory in Equilibrium

Thermal field theory has applications in many areas of physics and one of those is the early Universe. There is an excess of matter over antimatter in the present Universe. Unless this was an initial condition in the Big Bang Scenario, this baryon asymmetry must have been created during the evolution of the Universe. According to Sakarov’s three criteria for baryogenesis, the Universe must have...

Thermal matter and radiation in a gravitational field.

We study the one-loop contributions of matter and radiation to the gravitational polarization tensor at finite temperatures. Using the analytically continued imaginary-time formalism, the contribution of matter is explicitly given to next-to-leading (T ) order. We obtain an exact form for the contribution of radiation fields, expressed in terms of generalized Riemann zeta functions. A general e...

Gravitational field measurement with an equilibrium ensemble of cold atoms

A new approach to the measurement of gravitational fields with an equilibrium ensemble of ultra-cold alkali atoms confined in a cell of volume V is investigated. The proposed model of the gravitational sensor is based on a variation of the density profile of the ensemble due to changing of the gravitational field. For measurement the atomic density variations of the ensemble the electromagnetic...