We compute the electrical conductivity and shear viscosity at leading order in hot Quantum Electrodynamics. Starting from the Kubo relation for electrical conductivity and shear viscosity, we use diagrammatic methods to write down the appropriate integral equations for bosonic and fermionic effective vertices. We also show how Ward identities can be used to put constraints on these integral equations. One of our main results is an equation relating the kernels of the integral equations with functional derivatives of the full self-energy; it is similar to what is obtained with two-particle-irreducible effective action methods. However, since we use Ward identities as our starting point, gauge invariance is preserved. Using these constraints obtained from Ward identities and also power counting arguments, we select the necessary diagrams that must be resummed at leading order. This includes all non-collinear (corresponding to 2 to 2 scatterings) and collinear (corresponding to 1+N to 2+N collinear scatterings) rungs responsible for the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect. We also show the equivalence between our integral equations and the linearized Boltzmann equations of Arnold, Moore and Yaffe obtained using effective kinetic theory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.103198 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Gagnon, Jean-Sébastien. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Physics.) |
| Rights | © Jean-Sébastien Gagnon, 2007 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002671338, proquestno: AAINR38589, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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