Complete and Consistent Chiral Transport from Wigner Function Formalism

Abstract

Recently there has been significant interest in understanding the macroscopic quantum transport in a many-body system of chiral fermions. A natural framework for describing such a system which is generally out of equilibrium, is the transport equation for its phase space distribution function. In this paper, we obtain a complete solution of the covariant chiral transport for massless fermions, by starting from the general Wigner function formalism and carrying out a complete and consistent semiclassical expansion up to $\hat{\mathbf{O}}(\hslash )$ order. In particular, we clarify certain subtle and confusing issues surrounding the Lorentz non-invariance and frame dependence associated with the 3D chiral kinetic theory. We prove that such frame dependence is uniquely and completely fixed by an unambiguous definition of the $\hat{\mathbf{O}}(\hslash )$ correction to the distribution function in each reference frame.