Abstract
Recently, there has been significant interest in understanding the macroscopic quantum transport in a many-body system of chiral fermions. A natural framework for describing such a system that is generally out of equilibrium is the transport equation for its phase space distribution function. In this paper, we obtain a complete solution of the covariant chiral transport for massless fermions, by starting from the general Wigner function formalism and carrying out a complete and consistent semiclassical expansion up to order. In particular, we clarify certain subtle and confusing issues surrounding the Lorentz noninvariance and frame dependence associated with the three-dimensional chiral kinetic theory. We prove that such frame dependence is uniquely and completely fixed by an unambiguous definition of the correction to the distribution function in each reference frame.
- Received 2 February 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.036010
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society