1994/02/03 by J. C. D'Olivo, D'Olivo, J. C., J. F. Nieves +5
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/9402222
15 pages, Latex, LTP-036-UPR
arxiv created 1994/02/03 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
We argue that calculations in QED at finite temperature are more conveniently carried out in the Coulomb gauge, in which only the physical photon degrees of freedom play a rol and are thermalized. We derive the photon propagator in this gauge for real-time finite temperature calculations and show that the four-fermion static Coulomb interaction that appears in the Lagrangian can be accounted for by suitably modifying the photon propagator. The Feynman rules of the theory are written in a manifestly covariant form, although they depend on the velocity 4-vector uμ of the background medium. As a first step in showing the consistency and usefulness of this approach, we consider the one-loop calculation of the electron self-energy Σ. It is explicitly shown that the divergences that arise from the vacuum contribution to Σ are independent of uμ, which implies that the counter terms that must be included in the Lagrangian are the same as those in the vacuum.