Renormalized kinetic theory of classical fluids in and out of equilibrium (Q635782)

This paper is an extended presentation of a theory for the construction of renormalized kinetic equations that allow a description of the dynamics of classical systems in or out of equilibrium. The basis of the theory is an effective action functional \(\Omega\) of external potentials \(\phi\) that contains all information about the dynamical properties of the system. The presented formulation can also be regarded as (i) a generalization of the theory of density functionals of fluids in equilibrium to dynamical problems; and (ii) the classical mechanical counterpart of the theory of non-equilibrium Green's functions in quantum field theory. The paper is divided into 6 sections. The first one presents a wide spectrum of background material as a comprehensive introduction to the presented considerations. Section 2 gives basic definitions and notations in relation to basic results of classical statistical mechanics. In the next section, a development of the closed-time formulation of the proposed theory is presented. This is done by the closed time contour. The next subsections show the dynamics of the closed time contour, the effective action functional, functional derivatives of this functional, its connection to correlation functions and the generalized BBGKY hierarchy with its formal closure. The equations presented in Section 3 allow to derive a closed, self-consistent set of equations to describe the evolution of the single-particle phase-space distribution function of the system. Thus the next two sections presents a recast of the results into equations that involve quantities depending on physical time. For example, in Section 4, there is a discussion about initial conditions, reversibility, many body effects, conservation laws and also other non-equilibrium kinetic theories. Section 5 shows real-time representation of generating functional and time closure. The paper is summarized in Section 6. There are also 9 appendixes, amongst others BBGKY hierarchy, derivatives of effective action functional, linear combination of correlation and response functions, and diagrammatic representation.