Hamiltonian finite-temperature quantum field theory from its vacuum on partially compactified space

Abstract

The partition function of a relativistic invariant quantum field theory is expressed by its vacuum energy calculated on a spatial manifold with one dimension compactified to a 1-sphere $S^1 (β)$, whose circumference $β$ represents the inverse temperature. Explicit expressions for the usual energy density and pressure in terms of the energy density on the partially compactified spatial manifold $\mathbb{R}^2 \times S^1 (β)$ are derived. To make the resulting expressions mathematically well-defined a Poisson resummation of the Matsubara sums as well as an analytic continuation in the chemical potential are required. The new approach to finite-temperature quantum field theories is advantageous in a Hamilton formulation since it does not require the usual thermal averages with the density operator. Instead, the whole finite-temperature behaviour is encoded in the vacuum wave functional on the spatial manifold $\mathbb{R}^2 \times S^1 (β)$. We illustrate this approach by calculating the pressure of a relativistic Bose and Fermi gas and reproduce the known results obtained from the usual grand canonical ensemble. As a first non-trivial application we calculate the pressure of Yang-Mills theory as function of the temperature in a quasi-particle approximation motivated by variational calculations in Coulomb gauge.