Nonequilibrium Schwinger-Keldysh formalism for density matrix states: analytic properties and implications in cosmology

TL;DR

This paper develops a nonequilibrium Schwinger-Keldysh formalism for density matrix states, revealing analytic properties and implications for cosmology, especially in the context of the universe's quantum state and its evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized in-in formalism for Gaussian density matrices and explores their analytic and symmetry properties in cosmological settings.

Findings

Positive/negative frequency basis functions are selected by particle interpretation.

Wightman functions satisfy KMS conditions despite nonequilibrium.

Analytic structure shows Euclidean-Lorentzian evolution and quantum state decay.

Abstract

Motivated by cosmological Hartle-Hawking and microcanonical density matrix prescriptions for the quantum state of the Universe we develop Schwinger-Keldysh in-in formalism for generic nonequilibrium dynamical systems with the initial density matrix. We build the generating functional of in-in Green's functions and expectation values for a generic density matrix of the Gaussian type and show that the requirement of particle interpretation selects a distinguished set of positive/negative frequency basis functions of the wave operator of the theory, which is determined by the density matrix parameters. Then we consider a special case of the density matrix determined by the Euclidean path integral of the theory, which in the cosmological context can be considered as a generalization of the no-boundary pure state to the case of the microcanonical ensemble, and show that in view of a special reflection symmetry its Wightman Green's functions satisfy Kubo-Martin-Schwinger periodicity conditions which hold despite the nonequilibrium nature of the physical setup. Rich analyticity structure in the complex plane of the time variable reveals the combined Euclidean-Lorentzian evolution of the theory, which depending on the properties of the initial density matrix can be interpreted as a decay of a classically forbidden quantum state.