| Preface | p. xiii |
| Fundamentals of Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics | |
| Basic issues in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics | p. 3 |
| Macroscopic description of physical processes | p. 4 |
| Microscopic characterization from dynamical systems behavior | p. 11 |
| Physical conditions | p. 16 |
| Coarse graining and persistent structure in the physical world | p. 21 |
| Physical systems: Closed, open, effectively closed and effectively open | p. 26 |
| Appendix A: Stochastic processes and equations in a (tiny) nutshell | p. 31 |
| Relaxation, dissipation, noise and fluctuations | p. 39 |
| A simple model of Brownian motion | p. 39 |
| The Fokker-Planck and Kramers-Moyal equations | p. 45 |
| The Boltzmann equation | p. 49 |
| Quantum open systems | p. 60 |
| A quick review of quantum mechanics | p. 60 |
| Influence functional | p. 68 |
| The master equation | p. 72 |
| The Langevin equation | p. 73 |
| The Kramers-Moyal equation | p. 79 |
| Derivation of the propagator and the master equation | p. 82 |
| Consistent histories and decoherence functional | p. 86 |
| Basics of Nonequilibrium Quantum Field Theory | |
| Quantum fields on time-dependent backgrounds: Particle creation | p. 93 |
| Basic field theory | p. 94 |
| Particle production in external fields | p. 106 |
| Spontaneous and stimulated production | p. 111 |
| Quantum Vlasov equation | p. 114 |
| Periodically driven fields | p. 118 |
| Particle creation in a dynamical spacetime | p. 121 |
| Particle creation as squeezing | p. 131 |
| Squeezed quantum open systems | p. 143 |
| Open systems of interacting quantum fields | p. 148 |
| Influence functional: Two interacting quantum fields | p. 149 |
| Quantum functional master equation | p. 158 |
| The closed time path coarse-grained effective action | p. 162 |
| Functional methods in nonequilibrium QFT | p. 170 |
| Propagators | p. 171 |
| Functional methods | p. 174 |
| The closed time path effective action | p. 180 |
| Computing the closed time path effective action | p. 187 |
| The two-particle irreducible effective action | p. 195 |
| Handling divergences | p. 203 |
| Gauge Invariance, Dissipation, Entropy, Noise and Decoherence | |
| Closed time path effective action for gauge theories | p. 211 |
| Path integral quantization of gauge theories - an overview | p. 214 |
| The 2PI formalism applied to gauge theories | p. 223 |
| Gauge dependence and propagator structure | p. 226 |
| Dissipation and noise in mean field dynamics | p. 231 |
| Preliminaries | p. 234 |
| Dissipation in the mean field dynamics | p. 235 |
| Dissipation and particle creation | p. 236 |
| Particle creation and noise | p. 238 |
| Full quantum correlations from the Langevin approach | p. 240 |
| The fluctuation-dissipation theorem | p. 242 |
| Particle creation and decoherence | p. 243 |
| The nonlinear regime | p. 244 |
| Final remarks | p. 249 |
| Entropy generation and decoherence of quantum fields | p. 251 |
| Entropy generation from particle creation | p. 251 |
| Entropy of quantum fields | p. 255 |
| Entropy from the (apparent) damping of the mean field | p. 258 |
| Entropy of squeezed quantum open systems | p. 262 |
| Decoherence in a quantum phase transition | p. 270 |
| Spinodal decomposition of an interacting quantum field | p. 274 |
| Decoherence of the inflaton field | p. 281 |
| Thermal, Kinetic and Hydrodynamic Regimes | |
| Thermal field and linear response theory | p. 291 |
| The thermal generating functional | p. 291 |
| Linear response theory | p. 293 |
| The Kubo-Martin-Schwinger theorem | p. 294 |
| Thermal self-energy: Screening | p. 297 |
| Landau damping | p. 298 |
| Hard thermal loops | p. 305 |
| Quantum kinetic field theory | p. 315 |
| The Kadanoff-Baym equations | p. 315 |
| Quantum kinetic field theory on nontrivial backgrounds | p. 330 |
| Hydrodynamics and thermalization | p. 345 |
| Classical relativistic hydrodynamics | p. 346 |
| Quantum fields in the hydrodynamic limit | p. 353 |
| Transport functions in the hydrodynamic limit | p. 360 |
| Transport functions from linear response theory | p. 367 |
| Thermalization | p. 374 |
| Applications to Selected Current Research | |
| Nonequilibrium Bose-Einstein condensates | p. 391 |
| The closed time path integral approach to BECs | p. 393 |
| The symmetry-breaking approach to BECs | p. 396 |
| The particle number conserving formalism | p. 420 |
| Nonequilibrium issues in RHICs and DCCs | p. 429 |
| Relativistic heavy ion collisions (RHICs) | p. 429 |
| Disoriented chiral condensates (DCCs) | p. 439 |
| Nonequilibrium quantum processes in the early universe | p. 447 |
| Quantum fluctuations and noise in inflationary cosmology | p. 448 |
| Structure formation: Effect of colored noise | p. 457 |
| Reheating in the inflationary universe | p. 474 |
| References | p. 490 |
| Index | p. 530 |
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