Renormalization in open quantum field theory. Part I. Scalar field theory

Abstract

While the notion of open quantum systems is itself old, most of the existing studies deal with quantum mechanical systems rather than quantum field theories. After a brief review of field theoretical/path integral tools currently available to deal with open quantum field theories, we go on to apply these tools to an open version of ϕ3 + ϕ4 theory in four spacetime dimensions and demonstrate its one loop renormalizability (including the renormalizability of the Lindblad structure).