QUANTUM KINETICS OF PLASMA AND RADIATION - A NONEQUILIBRIUM GREENS-FUNCTION APPROACH

A microscopic description of an electron-ion plasma coupled to the qua ntized electromagnetic field as an interacting many-body system far fr om equilibrium is given, generalizing results of DuBois [1] to include two-particle correlations. As applications (1) light propagation thro ugh a partially ionized plasma is investigated including modifications of transition energy and -matrix element as well as dephasing and sca ttering due to Coulomb interaction, and (2) a T-matrix approximation f or the one-particle selfenergy and for the polarization 4-tensor is de veloped enabling a consistent treatment of two-particle correlations i n the nonlinear optical and transport properties of plasmas.