Speaker
Description
Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation cross sections in the presence of nearly zero-energy bound states can become so large that perturbative partial-wave unitarity appears to be violated. Previous literature incorporated the short-distance annihilation potential self-consistently into the computation of the Schrödinger wave function at the origin, leading to the unitarization of the Sommerfeld effect in vacuum. We employ non-relativistic effective field theory methods and the Keldysh-Schwinger formalism to additionally include pair-creation effects in the self-consistent computation of four-point correlation functions, which renders the unitarization temperature dependent. Up to small thermal corrections in the non-relativistic and dilute regime of the pairs, we confirm the previous results based on the Schrödinger equation approach for scattering states in vacuum. For the first time, we analyze bound-state contributions beyond their leading decay via annihilation. Interestingly, our self-consistent computation of the four-point correlation function shows that bound states remain on-shell in their out-of-equilibrium decay, even though their spectral functions take the form of Breit–Wigner distributions due to finite decay widths. While this may appear paradoxical, it aligns with expectations from earlier results based on exact analytic solutions of the Kadanoff–Baym equations for a decaying elementary particle in a thermal environment.