Venue: Physics Building, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, Seminar Room PHYS 2.116
Time: Thursday, January 12, 4:30 pm (s.t.)
Contact: hees@fias.uni-frankfurt.de

Motivated by the need for a more quantitative description of the late stage of heavy ion collisions, I review a surprising recent development which concerns the thermodynamics of quantum fields in systems subject to a geometric confinement. These include systems with an actual finite volume.

For the sake of my argument, I focus on a massless/massive single component non-interacting scalar field, even though the present idea is applicable to any renormalizable field theory, such as Quantum Chromodynamics.

I then demonstrate how thermodynamic quantities can be investigated from a different perspective, inspired by a more realistic approach to the finiteness of the size of such systems. Besides significant finite volume corrections, a number of interesting features naturally follow from the treatment of the volume of the system. Of particular interest, the absence of any infrared divergence, plaguing conventional finite temperature perturbation theory, sets a new and natural solution to the so-called infrared Linde problem.

The review, performed with different spatial compactifications, encompasses various thermodynamic quantities such as the pressure and the trace anomaly - all having non trivial temperature dependences, despite the absence of interaction at leading order.

Nuclear Physics Colloquium

Thermodynamics of quantum fields subject to a geometric confinement: When Casimir meets Linde

Sylvain F. Mogliacci (University of Cape Town)