Suppressed pair creation due to electron-positron attraction

Abstract

We propose a coupled Dirac sea approach to examine numerically the electron-positron pair creation process with interfermionic interactions in a supercritical background field. In this approach the Hilbert space is doubled, leading to two separate Dirac equations for the dynamics of the electrons and the positrons. It permits us to remove the unphysical self-repulsion while the internal electric fields that couple different fermions are determined from the Maxwell equations. The time evolution of the yield and the spatial distribution, as well as the energy spectra of the particles, show that the attractive force between the created particles decreases the pair creation probability, independent of the spatial characteristics of the force-intermediating internal fields. This decrease is accompanied by shifts in the kinetic energy spectrum of the emitted particles. These findings are supported by an independent model that predicts the creation rate based on the quantum mechanical transmission coefficient.