Time dependence of adiabatic particle number

We consider quantum field theoretic systems subject to a time-dependent perturbation, and discuss the question of defining a time-dependent particle number not just at asymptotic early and late times, but also during the perturbation. Naïvely, this is not a well-defined notion for such a nonequilibrium process, as the particle number at intermediate times depends on a basis choice of reference states with respect to which particles and antiparticles are defined, even though the final late-time particle number is independent of this basis choice. The basis choice is associated with a particular truncation of the adiabatic expansion. The adiabatic expansion is divergent, and we show that if this divergent expansion is truncated at its optimal order, a universal time dependence is obtained, confirming a general result of Dingle and Berry. This optimally truncated particle number provides a clear picture of quantum interference effects for perturbations with nontrivial temporal substructure. We illustrate these results using several equivalent definitions of adiabatic particle number: the Bogoliubov, Riccati, spectral function and Schrödinger picture approaches. In each approach, the particle number may be expressed in terms of the tiny deviations between the exact and adiabatic solutions of the Ermakov-Milne equation for the associated time-dependent oscillators.