Abstract
With increasing temperatures, Schwinger pair production changes from a quantum tunnelling to a classical, thermal process, determined by a worldline sphaleron. We show this and calculate the corresponding rate of pair production for both spinor and scalar quantum electrodynamics, including the semiclassical prefactor. For electron-positron pair production from a thermal bath of photons and in the presence of an electric field, the rate we derive is faster than both perturbative photon fusion and the zero temperature Schwinger process. We work to all-orders in the coupling and hence our results are also relevant to the pair production of (strongly coupled) magnetic monopoles in heavy ion collisions.
Highlights
In non-Abelian gauge theories, sphaleron processes, or thermal overbarrier transitions, have long been understood to dominate over quantum tunneling transitions at high enough temperatures [1,2,3,4].1 The same is true, for example, in gravitational theories [5]
Schwinger pair production changes from a quantum tunneling to a classical, thermal process, determined by a worldline sphaleron
In this paper we briefly review the derivation of the worldline sphaleron and calculate the sphaleron rate, including the fluctuation prefactor
Summary
In non-Abelian gauge theories, sphaleron processes, or thermal overbarrier transitions, have long been understood to dominate over quantum tunneling transitions at high enough temperatures [1,2,3,4].1 The same is true, for example, in gravitational theories [5]. At high enough temperatures, such that T > gE=ð2mÞ, where g is the charge coupling and m is the mass of the (lightest) charged particles, the worldline instanton calculation suggests that the one loop calculation is no longer a consistent truncation of the problem and thermal corrections are expected at leading order [8,11,12,16]. The chief result of this paper is the following, the sphaleron rate for thermal Schwinger pair production, 3Of course photon loops will generate this term.
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