The thermal operator representation for Matsubara sums

Abstract

We prove in full generality the thermal operator representation for Matsubara sums in a relativistic field theory of scalar and fermionic particles. It states that the full result of performing the Matsubara sum associated to any given Feynman graph, in the imaginary-time formalism of finite-temperature field theory, can be directly obtained from its corresponding zero-temperature energy integral, by means of a simple linear operator, which is independent of the external Euclidean energies and whose form depends solely on the topology of the graph.