Thermal Field Theory in a layer: Applications of Thermal Field Theory methods to the propagation of photons in a two-dimensional electron sheet

TL;DR

This paper applies Thermal Field Theory to analyze photon propagation in a two-dimensional electron plasma sheet, deriving dispersion relations and polarization properties for various thermal distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed method to compute photon self-energy and propagator in a 2D plasma, extending Thermal Field Theory applications to layered systems.

Findings

Derived photon dispersion relations in 2D plasma

Calculated polarization vectors for different thermal distributions

Provided formulas applicable to general thermal conditions

Abstract

We apply the Thermal Field Theory methods to study the propagation of photons in a plasma layer, that is a plasma in which the electrons are confined to a two-dimensional plane sheet. We calculate the photon self-energy and determine the appropriate expression for the photon propagator in such a medium, from which the properties of the propagating modes are obtained. The formulas for the photon dispersion relations and polarization vectors are derived explicitly in some detail for some simple cases of the thermal distributions of the charged particle gas, and appropriate formulas that are applicable in more general situations are also given.