Renormalization in Open Quantum Field theory I: Scalar field theory

Abstract

While the notion of open quantum systems is itself old, most of the existing studies deal with quantum mechanical systems rather than quantum field theories. After a brief review of field theoretical/path integral tools currently available to deal with open quantum field theories, we go on to apply these tools to an open version of $\phi^3$ + $\phi^4$ theory in four spacetime dimensions and demonstrate its one loop renormalizability (including the renormalizability of the Lindblad structure).