Kinetic theory of fermions in curved spacetime

Christian Fidler, Cyril Pitrou

Published 2017-01-25Version 1

We build a statistical description of fermions, taking into account the spin degree of freedom in addition to the momentum of particles, and we detail its use in the context of the kinetic theory of gases of fermions particles. We show that the one-particle distribution function needed to write a Liouville equation is a spinor valued operator. The degrees of freedom of this function are covariantly described by an intensity function and by a polarisation vector which are parallel transported by free streaming. Collisions are described on the microscopic level and lead to a Boltzmann equation for this operator. We apply our formalism to the case of weak interactions, which at low energies can be considered as a contact interaction between fermions, allowing us to discuss the structure of the collision term for a few typical weak-interaction mediated reactions. In particular we find for massive particles that a dipolar distribution of velocities in the interacting species is necessary to generate linear polarisation, as opposed to the case of photons for which linear polarisation is generated from the quadrupolar distribution of velocities.