A realistic heat bath: theory and application to kink-antikink dynamics

Abstract

We propose a new method of studying a real-time canonical evolution of field-theoretic systems with boundary coupling to a realistic heat bath. In the free-field case the method is equivalent to an infinite extension of the system beyond the boundary, while in the interacting case the extension of the system is done in linear approximation. We use this technique to study kink-antikink dynamics in $φ^4$ field theory in 1+1 dimensions.