Nonperturbative QED effective action at finite temperature

Abstract

We propose a novel method for the effective action of spinor and scalar QED at finite temperature in time-dependent electric fields, where charged pairs evolve in a nonadiabatic way. The imaginary part of the effective action consists of thermal loops of the Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein distribution for the initial thermal ensemble, weighted with factors of the Bogoliubov coefficients for quantum effects. And the real part of the effective action is determined by the mean number of produced pairs and vacuum polarization at zero temperature. In the weak-field limit, the mean number of produced pairs is shown twice the imaginary part. We explicitly find the finite-temperature effective action in a constant electric field.