On the Role of Quasiparticles and thermal Masses in Nonequilibrium Processes in a Plasma

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quasiparticles and their thermal masses influence nonequilibrium processes in a plasma, providing an analytic framework that bridges higher order quantum effects with effective kinetic descriptions, with implications for cosmology.

Contribution

It develops an intuitive quantum field theory approach to incorporate higher order effects into quasiparticle descriptions, including off-shell contributions and their impact on relaxation rates.

Findings

Off-shell effects can be significant even at moderate widths.

Analytic expressions for nonequilibrium propagators are derived.

Implications for particle production and reheating in cosmology are discussed.

Abstract

Boltzmann equations and their matrix valued generalisations are commonly used to describe nonequilibrium phenomena in cosmology. On the other hand, it is known that in gauge theories at high temperature processes involving many quanta, which naively are of higher order in the coupling, contribute to the relaxation rate at leading order. How does this accord with the use of single particle distribution functions in the kinetic equations? When can these effects be parametrised in an effective description in terms of quasiparticles? And what is the kinematic role of their thermal masses? We address these questions in the framework of nonequilibrium quantum field theory and develop an intuitive picture in which contributions from higher order processes are parametrised by the widths of resonances in the plasma. In the narrow width limit we recover the quasiparticle picture, with the additional processes giving rise to off-shell parts of quasiparticle propagators that appear to violate energy conservation. In this regime we give analytic expressions for the scalar and fermion nonequilibrium propagators in a medium. We compare the efficiency of decays and scatterings involving real quasiparticles, computed from analytic expressions for the relaxation rates via trilinear scalar and Yukawa interactions for all modes, to off-shell contributions and find that the latter can be significant even for moderate widths. Our results apply to various processes including thermal production of particles from a plasma, dissipation of fields in a medium and particle propagation in dense matter. We discuss cosmological implications, in particular for the maximal temperature achieved during reheating by perturbative inflaton decay.