The Dirac vacuum is a non-linear polarisable medium rather than an empty space. This non-linear behaviour starts to be significant for extremely large electromagnetic fields such as the magnetic field on the surface of certain neutron stars. Even though the null temperature case was deeply studied in the past decades, the problem at non-zero temperature needs to be better understood.
In this talk, we will present the first rigorous derivation of the one-loop effective magnetic Lagrangian at positive temperature, a non-linear functional describing the free energy of quantum vacuum in a classical magnetic field. After introducing our model, we will properly define the free energy functional using the Pauli-Villars regularisation technique in order to remove the worst ultraviolet divergences, which represent a well known issue of the theory. The study of the properties of this functional will be addressed before focusing on the limit of slowly varying classical magnetic fields. In this regime, one can prove the convergence of this functional to the Euler-Heisenberg formula with thermal corrections, recovering the effective Lagrangian first derived by Dittrich in 1979. The talk is based on the work available at arXiv:2404.12733.