2014/05/12 by A. K. Rajgaopal, Rajgaopal, A. K.
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1405.2825
8 pages, no figures
arxiv created 2014/05/12 · openalex publication_date 2014/05/12 · arxiv updated 2014/05/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The following issues are discussed inspired by the recent paper of Kadanoff (arXiv: 1403:6162): (a) Construction of a generalized one-particle Wigner distribution (GWD) function (analog of the classical distribution function) from which the quantum kinetic equation due to Kadanoff and Baym (KB) is derived, often called the Quantum Boltzmann Equation (QBE); (b) The equation obeyed by this has a collision contribution in the form of a two-particle Green function. This term is manipulated to have Kinetic Entropy in parallel to its counterpart in the classical Boltzmann kinetic equation for the classical distribution function. This proved to be problematic in that unlike in the classical Boltzmann kinetic equation, the contribution from the kinetic entropy term was non-positive; (3) Kadanoff surmised that this situation could perhaps be related to quantum entanglement that may not have been included in his theory. It is shown that GWD is not positive everywhere (indicating dynamical quantumness) just like the commonly recognized property of the Wigner function (negative property indicating quantumness of the state). The issue of non-positive feature appearing in approximate evaluation of patently positive entities in many particle systems is here pointed to an early discussion of this issue (Phys. Rev. A10, 1852 (1974)) in terms of a theorem on truncation of cumulant expansion of a probability distribution function due to Marcinkeiwicz. The last issue of presence or absence of entanglement in an approximate evaluation of a many particle correlation poses a new problem; it is considered here in terms of fermionic entanglement theory in the light of density matrix and Green function theory of many-fermion systems. The clue comes from the fact that the Hartree-Fock approximation exhbits no entantanglement in two-particle fermion density matrix and hence also in two-particle Green function.