Self-energy corrections to fermions in the presence of a thermal background

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Abstract
The interaction of a fermion with a thermal background in the context of QED is investigated. Employing the matrix form of the real-time formalism for the propagators, the one-loop fermion self-energy is calculated for the general case of finite temperature and chemical potential. These results are shown to include others found in the recent literature as special cases. As an application, the shift of the electron’s mass in a neutron star is calculated. It is shown that, at neutron-star densities, the shift is large compared to the free-particle electron mass, but small compared to the electron chemical potential.