Abstract
Electron-positron pair production from vacuum in external electric fields with space and time dependencies is studied numerically using real time Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism. The influence of spatial focusing scale of the electric field on momentum distribution and the total yield of the particles is examined by considering standing wave mode of the electric field with different temporal configurations. With the decrease of spatial extent of the external field, signatures of the temporal field are weaken in the momentum spectrum. Moreover, in the extremely small spatial extent, novel features emerge due to the combined effects of both temporal and spatial variations. We also find that for dynamically assisted particle production, while the total particle yield drops significantly in small spatial extents, the assistance mechanism tends to increase in these highly inhomogeneous regimes, where the slow and fast pulses are affected differently by the overall spatial inhomogeneity.
Highlights
Schwinger pair production is a nonperturbative phenomenon in quantum electrodynamics (QED) in which electrons and positrons are created from vacuum under intense electromagnetic fields [1,2,3]
II A, we briefly review the DHW formalism used in our work and discuss the numerical strategy of solving the partial differential equations in Sec
By adopting the numerical method introduced in the previous section, we study the eþe− pair production in 1 þ 1 dimensions with field forms given in Eq (1)
Summary
Schwinger pair production is a nonperturbative phenomenon in quantum electrodynamics (QED) in which electrons and positrons are created from vacuum under intense electromagnetic fields [1,2,3]. When the finite spatial pulse size is introduced to the multiphoton pair production process, it is shown that the ponderomotive force due to strong spatial focusing causes peak splitting in the momentum spectrum [26] These findings imply that the spatial inhomogeneity of the external fields, combined with various temporal field profiles, affects the produced particle’s momentum spectrum as well as production rate and may result in new phenomena; see Ref. [33], we use the real time DHW formalism to investigate how the results of vacuum pair production are affected by the finite spatial extent of the electric field by considering space and time variations for the external field with different temporal structures. Throughout this article, natural units (ħ 1⁄4 c 1⁄4 1) are used and the quantities are presented in terms of the electron mass m and the electron Compton wavelength λcðλc 1⁄4 m−1Þ
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