Chiral Lagrangians out of thermal equilibrium

Abstract

We extend Chiral Perturbation Theory to study a meson gas out of thermal equilibrium. We assume that the system is initially in equilibrium at a temperature below the phase transition and work within a Schwinger-Keldysh contour technique. To lowest order and in the chiral limit, our model is a nonlinear sigma model with a time-dependent pion decay function (PDF), which we consistently define in terms of the axial current two-point correlator. As a first application, we analyse the PDF up to one loop and find the initial temperature dependence of the lowest order coefficients in the short-time expansion. We discuss the applicability of our approach to the time evolution of the plasma formed after a RHIC and discuss the interpretation of our model in a curved space-time background context.