Let's move to physical quantities: Keldysh Green functions!

Yuli Nazarov: [I] remember a talk given by a high-class theorist with a taste for abstract models, young experimentalists being his primary audience. Somewhere in the middle of the talk he said: "Now let us move to physical quantities, namely, Keldysh Green functions". A burst of laugh lasted for more than five minutes!

For many years Keldysh formalism was considered too much complicated for a practical researcher and hardly applied beyond several specific fields. "Keldysh approach" sounded as a synonym of unnecessary theorization and an antonym to clear physical reasoning.

Excerpts from:

Keldysh formalism for multiple parallel worlds

Abstract:
We present here a compact and self-contained review of recently developed Keldysh formalism for multiple parallel worlds. The formalism has been applied to consistent quantum evaluation of the flows of informational quantities, in particular, to evaluation of Renyi and Shannon entropy flows. We start with the formulation of standard and extended Keldysh technique in single world in a form convenient for our presentation. We explain the use of Keldysh contours encompassing multiple parallel worlds In the end, we shortly summarize the concrete results obtained with the method.

Mohammad Ansari and Yuli V. Nazarov
arXiv/1509.04253

(Submitted on 14 Sep 2015)

It is a big honour for us to present these results in a special issue celebrating numerous scientific merits of Leonid Veniaminovich Keldysh. We gladly appreciate his pioneering research that provided a powerful and indispensable tool for many generations of quantum physicists, us including, and wish him many happy returns of the day.