Nonequilibrium dynamics in the O(N) model to next-to-next-to-leading order in the 1/N expansion

Abstract

Nonequilibrium dynamics in quantum field theory has been studied extensively using truncations of the 2PI effective action. Both 1/N and loop expansions beyond leading order show remarkable improvement when compared to mean-field approximations. However, in truncations used so far, only the leading-order parts of the self energy responsible for memory loss, damping and equilibration are included, which makes it difficult to discuss convergence systematically. For that reason we derive the real and causal evolution equations for an O(N) model to next-to-next-to-leading order in the 2PI-1/N expansion. Due to the appearance of internal vertices the resulting equations appear intractable for a full-fledged 3+1 dimensional field theory. Instead, we solve the closely related three-loop approximation in the auxiliary-field formalism numerically in 0+1 dimensions (quantum mechanics) and compare to previous approximations and the exact numerical solution of the Schroedinger equation.