ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the salient properties of zero-temperature, real-time finite temperature, and thermal Green's functions in turn. It considers the effect of the energy and momentum dependence of the self-energy on quasiparticle propagation in an interacting Fermi system. The chapter illustrates the major points for the case of a nucleon in translationally invariant nuclear matter. Although Green's functions were introduced because of their physical connection to response functions, they contain sufficient information to evaluate all ground state observables or thermal averages. The real-time Green's function, which describes the physical response of a system, may thereby, be obtained from the thermal Green's function. The essential point in relating the optical potential to the self-energy is the observation that the wave function can be written in terms of the one-particle Green's function. A good approximation to the response may be obtained using the response function for a non-interacting Fermi gas corrected for the medium dependence of the nucleon self-energy.
