Building upon the recent pioneering work by Mazenko and by Das and Mazenko, we develop a microscopic, non-equilibrium, statistical field theory for initially correlated canonical ensembles of classical microscopic particles obeying Hamiltonian dynamics. Our primary target is cosmic structure formation, where initial Gaussian correlations in phase space are believed to be set by inflation. We give an exact expression for the generating functional of this theory and work out suitable approximations. We specify the initial correlations by a power spectrum and derive general expressions for the correlators of the density and the response field. We derive simple closed expressions for the lowest-order contributions to the nonlinear cosmological power spectrum, valid for arbitrary wave numbers. We further calculate the bispectrum expected in this theory within these approximations and the power spectrum of cosmic density fluctuations to first order in the gravitational interaction, using a recent improvement of the Zel'dovich approximation. We show that, with a modification motivated by the adhesion approximation, the nonlinear growth of the density power spectrum found in numerical simulations of cosmic structure evolution is reproduced well to redshift zero and for arbitrary wave numbers even within first-order perturbation theory. Our results present the first fully analytic calculation of the nonlinear power spectrum of cosmic structures.

In earlier work, we have developed a nonequilibrium statistical field theory description of cosmic structure formation, dubbed Kinetic Field Theory (KFT), which is based on the Hamiltonian phase-space dynamics of classical particles and thus remains valid beyond shell-crossing. Here, we present an exact reformulation of the KFT framework that allows to resum an infinite subset of terms appearing in the original perturbative expansion of KFT. We develop the general formalism of this resummed KFT, including a diagrammatic language for the resummed perturbation theory, and compute the lowest-order results for the power spectra of the dark matter density contrast and momentum density. This allows us to derive analytically how the linear growth of the largest structures emerges from Newtonian particle dynamics alone, which, to our knowledge, is the first time this has been achieved.

Kinetic Field Theory (KFT) is a statistical field theory for an ensemble of point-like classical particles in or out of equilibrium. We review its application to cosmological structure formation. Beginning with the construction of the generating functional of the theory, we describe in detail how the theory needs to be adapted to reflect the expanding spatial background and the homogeneous and isotropic, correlated initial conditions for cosmic structures. Based on the generating functional, we develop three main approaches to non-linear, late-time cosmic structures, which rest either on the Taylor expansion of an interaction operator, suitable averaging procedures for the interaction term, or a resummation of perturbation terms. We show how an analytic, parameterfree equation for the non-linear cosmic power spectrum can be derived.We explain how the theory can be used to derive the density profile of gravitationally bound structures and use it to derive power spectra of cosmic velocity densities. We further clarify how KFT relates to the BBGKY hierarchy. We then proceed to apply kinetic field theory to fluids, introduce a reformulation of KFT in terms of macroscopic quantities which leads to a resummation scheme, and use this to describe mixtures of gas and dark matter. We discuss how KFT can be applied to study cosmic structure formation with modified theories of gravity. As an example for an application to a noncosmological particle ensemble, we show results on the spatial correlation function of cold Rydberg atoms derived from KFT.