Nonequilibrium chiral perturbation theory and pion decay functions

Abstract

We extend chiral perturbation theory to study a meson gas out of thermal equilibrium. Assuming that the system is initially in equilibrium below the critical temperature and working within the Schwinger-Keldysh contour technique, we define consistently the time-dependent pion decay functions, the counterparts of the pion decay constants, and calculate them up to next to leading order. The link with curved space-time QFT allows to establish nonequilibrium renormalisation. The short-time behaviour and the applicability to a heavy-ion collision plasma are also discussed in this work.