Abstract
We discuss gluon production by the Schwinger mechanism in collinear color-electric and magnetic fields which may be realized in pre-equilibrium stages of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Fluctuations of non-Abelian gauge fields around a purely color-magnetic field contain exponentially growing unstable modes in a longitudinally soft momentum region, which is known as the Nielsen–Olesen instability. With a color-electric field imposed parallelly to the color-magnetic field, we can formulate this instability as the Schwinger mechanism. This is because soft unstable modes are accelerated by the electric fields to escape from the instability condition. Effects of instability remain in the transverse spectrum of particle modes, leading to an anomalously intense Schwinger particle production.
Highlights
Multi-particle production in strong fields is a typical unstable phenomenon that can be seen in extreme situations such as ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, high-energy astrophysical objects, and possibly high-intensity laser
A straightforward description of such an instability may be given by the effective action of the strong fields
Our analysis has relied on the linear approximation
Summary
Multi-particle production in strong fields is a typical unstable phenomenon that can be seen in extreme situations such as ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, high-energy astrophysical objects, and possibly high-intensity laser. The instability in a purely electric field consists of normalizable and asymptotically stable modes, and thereby can be interpreted as particle productions [5, 6] One can formulate it as a non-Abelian analog of the Schwinger mechanism [7]. The instability in a purely magnetic background is caused by rapid growth of particular fluctuations and cannot be formulated as particle production unless the magnetic field is turned off in finite time so that the modes are stabilized This “Nielsen–Olesen (N-O) instability” [8] is characteristic of non-Abelian gauge fields because the properties of self-interaction and spin-1 are necessary. In this Letter, we study, within the canonical quantization approach, the gauge field instability (gluon production) when both electric and magnetic background fields are present
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