English

Spin evolution of massive fermion in QED plasma

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2022-11-09 v1

Abstract

The dynamical evolution of spin of a massive probe fermion in a massless hot QED plasma at local equilibrium is investigated through the quantum kinetic theory. We consider the massive probe fermion undergoing 2-by-2 Coulomb scattering with the massless fermions in the medium. The axial kinetic equation is derived including the collision terms to the first order of gradients and leading logarithmic order of the coupling. The collision terms are vanishing at global equilibrium, around which the relaxation time can be extracted as an operator. We further decompose the axial kinetic equation into kinetic equations of axial-charge density as well as the transverse magnetic dipole moment, and illustrate the diffusion and polarization effect through preliminary numerical analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.09334,
  title  = {Spin evolution of massive fermion in QED plasma},
  author = {Ziyue Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.09334},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

20 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:21:52.508Z