Nonperturbative gluon pair production from a constant chromo-electric field via the Schwinger mechanism in arbitrary gauge

Abstract

We study the non-perturbative production of gluon pairs from a constant SU(3) chromo-electric background field via the Schwinger mechanism. We fix the covariant background gauge with an arbitrary gauge parameter \alpha. We determine the transverse momentum distribution of the gluons, as well as the total probability of creating pairs per unit space time volume. We find that the result is independent of the covariant gauge parameter \alpha used to define arbitrary covariant background gauges. We find that our non-perturbative result is both gauge invariant and gauge parameter \alpha independent.