Kinetic theory of radiation in non-equilibrium relativistic plasmas Original Research Article

Many-particle QED is applied to kinetic theory of radiative processes in many-component plasmas with relativistic electrons and non-relativistic heavy particles. Within the framework of non-equilibrium Green’s function technique, transport and mass-shell equations for fluctuations of the electromagnetic field are obtained. We show that the transverse field correlation functions can be decomposed into sharply peaked (non-Lorentzian) parts that describe resonant (propagating) photons and off-shell parts corresponding to virtual photons in plasmas. Analogous decompositions are found for the longitudinal field correlation functions and the correlation functions of relativistic electrons. As a novel result a kinetic equation for the resonant photons with a finite spectral width is derived. The off-shell parts of the particle and field correlation functions are shown to be essential to calculate the local radiating power in relativistic plasmas and recover the results of vacuum QED. The influence of plasma effects and collisional broadening of the relativistic quasiparticle spectral function on radiative processes is discussed.