The Apparent Irreversibility of Particle Creation: a Study of Time Scales and of the Mechanisms Responsible for Entropy Production in Quantum Field Theory.

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In the presence of strong gravitational, electromagnetic or other gauge fields, particle-antiparticle pairs are created out of the vacuum. Creation processes of this type are responsible for, e.g., hadron production in heavy ion collisions or the radiation of black holes. They lead to an increase in entropy, thus contributing to the thermalization of the system under consideration. This suggests that particle creation in strong fields is an irreversible process. Key issues to be addressed are: (i) under which conditions particle creation is indeed irreversible, and how this can be reconciled with the time-reversal invariance of the underlying microscopic dynamics; (ii) if--and if so, how--particle creation can be described within the framework of a theory of nonequilibrium processes; (iii) how the associated entropy is defined; and (iv) how particle creation can be incorporated into a kinetic equation that also accounts for subsequent acceleration and collisions. These issues will be studied by means of the projection method. After a comprehensive introduction to that method, it will be applied to a simple model from quantum electrodynamics which incorporates acceleration, collisions, and pair creation due to the Schwinger mechanism. For this model, I will obtain: (1) the complete set of time scales, which furnishes a precise mathematical criterion for the irreversibility of particle creation; (2) the associated relevant entropy to which the H-theorem applies; and (3) a generalisation of the quantum Boltzmann equation which includes a source term derived from first principles.

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