conservation laws and the quantum theory of transport the.pdfVIP

CONSERVATION LAWS AND THE QUANTUM THEORY OF TRANSPORT: THE EARLY DAYS Gordon Baym Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1110 W. Green St., Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA This talk reviews, from an historical perspective, a chapter in the development of quantum transport theory within the framework of self-consistent non-equilibrium Green’s functions. 1 INTRODUCTION Nearly forty years have sped by since Leo Kadanoff and I worked in Copen- hagen on understanding the role of conservation laws and the description of transport in quantum many particle systems. To set the stage for this meeting, I would like to describe here the physics and historical background of our work in these early days. First a few biographical notes. As the photographs that graced the dust jacket of our 1962 book Quantum statistical mechanics1 show, Leo and I were both in our mid-twenties at the time. When the two of us started life in the 1930’s, our parents quite coincidentally lived just about a block apart in In- wood, a neighborhood in upper Manhattan in New York City, mine on Payson Avenue (no. 1 on the map) and his on Seaman Avenue (no. 2). Our immedi- ate neighborhood turned out to be quite a fertile one for theoretical physicists. Roy Glauber grew up in the same apartment building as the Kadanoffs, and Shelly Glashow lived just a block or so away. We all went to the same elemen- tary school (no. 3 on the map), imaginatively named PS52 (PS for “Public School”), and all were at Harvard in the 1950’s. The theorists at Harvard in the late fifties were very excited by recent developments in the many body problem, and particularly by the paper by Paul 2 on the formalism for finite