Kinetic Theory of Radiation in Nonequilibrium Relativistic Plasmas

TL;DR

This paper develops a kinetic theory framework for radiation in nonequilibrium relativistic plasmas using many-particle QED and Green's functions, deriving equations for photon and particle correlations including resonant and virtual photons.

Contribution

It introduces a novel kinetic equation for resonant photons with finite spectral width and emphasizes the importance of off-shell correlations in plasma radiative processes.

Findings

Decomposition of field correlation functions into resonant and virtual photon parts.

Derivation of a kinetic equation for resonant photons with spectral width.

Demonstration of the role of off-shell correlations in calculating plasma radiative power.

Abstract

Many-particle QED is applied to kinetic theory of radiative processes in many- component plasmas with relativistic electrons and nonrelativistic heavy particles. Within the framework of nonequilibrium Green's function technique, transport and mass-shell equations for fluctuations of the electromagnetic field are obtained. We show that the transverse field correlation functions can be decomposed into sharply peaked (non-Lorentzian) parts that describe resonant (propagating) photons and off-shell parts corresponding to virtual photons in plasmas. Analogous decomposi- tions are found for the longitudinal field correlation functions and the correlation functions of relativistic electrons. As a novel result a kinetic equation for the reso- nant photons with a finite spectral width is derived. The off-shell parts of the particle and field correlation functions are shown to be essential to calculate the local ra- diating power in relativistic plasmas and recover the results of vacuum QED. The influence of plasma effects and collisional broadening of the relativistic quasiparticle spectral function on radiative processes is discussed.