Introduction

This chapter gives a general introduction to the book. The book aims to provide the readers with a practical working knowledge on how to use the tools of the contour many-body Green’s functions for time-dependent problems. Its scope is to highlight the universality and versatility of the contour Schwinger–Keldysh formalism to treat a wide class of physical phenomena. A self-contained introduction to the topic is provided together with a considerable amount of detailed derivations, which make the text accessible to graduate students with minimal training in Green’s functions methods. The book also possesses a distinct degree of originality and contains material not commonly found in other books or review articles on the subject.