Schwinger Pair Creation Research Articles

The worldline formalism in strong-field QED

The worldline formalism provides an alternative to Feynman diagrams that has been found particularly useful for external-field calculations in quantum electrodynamics. Here I summarize its present range of applications, which includes Schwinger pair creation, photon splitting in constant fields and plane-wave backgrounds, as well as non-linear Compton scattering in constant fields.

Plasma dynamics at the Schwinger limit and beyond.

Strong field physics close to or above the Schwinger limit are typically studied with vacuum as initial condition or by considering test particle dynamics. However, with a plasma present initially, quantum relativistic mechanisms such as Schwinger pair creation are complemented by classical plasma nonlinearities. In this work we use the Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism to study the interplay between classical and quantum mechanical mechanisms in the regime of ultrastrong electric fields. In particular, the effects of initial density and temperature on the plasma oscillation dynamics are determined. Finally, comparisons with competing mechanisms such as radiation reaction and Breit-Wheeler pair production are made.

Schwinger pair creation with the backreaction in 3+1 dimensions

In this work, I analyze the structure of the QED spacetime lattice and review the Schwinger pair creation process from a thermodynamic point of view. This viewpoint enables the dynamical mean-field calculation for the 3 + 1 dimensional Schwinger pair creation with the backreaction. As an example, I demonstrate how to evaluate the pair creation in a finite volume with external electric fields turned on at $t = 0$. The numerical results show how the backreaction responds to the external fields and influences the pair creation.

Schwinger pair creation for monolayer graphene in a constant electromagnetic field, and in noncommutative phase space coordinates

In this paper, we study the creation of particles from the vacuum in monolayer graphene by an electromagnetic field in a noncommutative (NC) phase space coordinate considering the Schwinger method. For two different gauges, the probability of particle creation is calculated using the effective action, and special cases are considered. The essential result is that the noncommutativity of the phase space contributes to the effective action and consequently it has an influence on the process of pair creation from the vacuum.

Exact instantons via worldline deformations

The imaginary part of the one loop effective action in external backgrounds can be efficiently computed using worldline instantons which are closed periodic paths in spacetime. Exact solutions for nonstatic backgrounds are only known in certain cases. In this paper, we propose a novel technique allowing the construction of further exactly solvable models. In order to do so, we introduce a deformation function which maps the worldline instantons for a given model to the closed periodic stationary paths of a new model. Executing this procedure iteratively results in a chain of infinitely many solvable models. Similar ideas were applied to topological and nontopological defects in quantum field theory. We explicitly discuss the tunneling exponential in the Schwinger pair creation rate and illustrate the validity of the proposed technique for well-known cases.

Particle Creation: Schwinger + Unruh + Hawking

We discuss the interconnection between the Schwinger pair creation in electric field, Hawking radiation and particle creation in the Unruh effect. All three processes can be described in terms of the entropy and temperature. These thermodynamic like processes can be combined. We consider the combined process of creation of charged and electrically neutral particles in the electric field, which combines the Schwinger and Unruh effects. We also consider the creation of the charged black and white holes in electric field, which combines the Schwinger effect and the black hole entropy. The combined processes obey the sum rules for the entropy and for the inverse temperature. Some contributions to the entropy and to the temperature are negative, which reflects the quantum entanglement between the created objects.

Characters, quasinormal modes, and Schwinger pairs in dS2 with flux

An integral representation of the 1-loop partition function for charged scalars and spinors, minimally coupled to a uniform U(1) field on S2, is given in terms of SO(1, 2) Harish-Chandra group characters and evaluated exactly in terms of Hurwitz ζ-functions. Analytically continuing the U(1) field, we interpret the path integrals as quasicanonical partition functions in dS2 with an electric field. The character itself is obtained as a trace over states living at the future boundary of de Sitter and has a quasinormal mode expansion. The imaginary part of the partition function captures Schwinger pair creation in the static patch at finite temperature. The thermal enhancement is most noticeable for scalar masses below Hubble and leads to non-monotonicity of the current as a function of the field. This parameter range, when dimensionally reducing from a charged or rotating Nariai spacetime, is excluded by Swampland-inspired bounds. Around the AdS2 black hole, in contrast to dS2, there is a threshold to pair creation.

Backreaction of Schwinger pair creation in massive QED2

Particle-antiparticle pairs can be produced by background electric fields via the Schwinger mechanism provided they are unconfined. If, as in QED in (3+1)-d these particles are massive, the particle production rate is exponentially suppressed below a threshold field strength. Above this threshold, the energy for pair creation must come from the electric field itself which ought to eventually relax to the threshold strength. Calculating this relaxation in a self-consistent manner, however, is difficult. Chu and Vachaspati addressed this problem in the context of capacitor discharge in massless QED2 [1] by utilizing bosonization in two-dimensions. When the bare fermions are massless, the dual bosonized theory is free and capacitor discharge can be analyzed exactly [1], however, special care is required in its interpretation given that the theory exhibits confinement. In this paper we reinterpret the findings of [1], where the capacitors Schwinger-discharge via electrically neutral dipolar meson-production, and generalize this to the case where the fermions have bare masses. Crucially, we note that when the initial charge of the capacitor is large compared to the charge of the fermions, Q » e, the classical equation of motion for the bosonized model accurately characterizes the dynamics of discharge. For massless QED2, we find that the discharge is suppressed below a critical plate separation that is commensurate with the length scale associated with the meson dipole moment. For massive QED2, we find in addition, a mass threshold familiar from (3+1)-d, and show the electric field relaxes to a final steady state with a magnitude proportional to the initial charge. We discuss the wider implications of our findings and identify challenges in extending this treatment to higher dimensions.

Response of the QED(2) vacuum to a quench: Long-term oscillations of the electric field and the pair creation rate

We consider—within QED(2)—the backreaction to the Schwinger pair creation in a time dependent, spatially homogeneous electric field. Our focus is the screening of the external field as a quench and the subsequent long-term evolution of the resulting electric field. Our numerical solutions of the self consistent, fully backreacted dynamical equations exhibit a self-sustaining oscillation of both the electric field and the pair number depending on the coupling strength.

Schwinger pair production and string breaking in non-Abelian gauge theory from real-time lattice improved Hamiltonians

Far-from-equilibrium dynamics of SU(2) gauge theory with Wilson fermions is studied in 1+1 space-time dimensions using a real-time lattice approach. Lattice improved Hamiltonians are shown to be very efficient in simulating Schwinger pair creation and emergent phenomena such as plasma oscillations. As a consequence, significantly smaller lattices can be employed to approach continuum physics in the infinite-volume limit as compared to unimproved implementations. This allows us to compute also higher-order correlation functions including four fermion fields, which give unprecedented insights into the real-time dynamics of the fragmentation process of strings between fermions and antifermions.

Multiloop Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangians, Schwinger Pair Creation, and the Photon S-Matrix

Although the perturbation series in quantum electrodynamics has been studied for eighty years concerning its high-order behavior, our present understanding is still poorer than for many other field theories. An interesting case is Schwinger pair creation in a constant electric field, which may possibly provide a window to high loop orders; simple non-perturbative closed-form expressions have been conjectured for the pair creation rate in the weak field limit, for scalar QED in 1982 by Affleck, Alvarez, and Manton, and for spinor QED by Lebedev and Ritus in 1984. Using Borel analysis, these can be used to obtain non-perturbative information on the on-shell renormalized N-photon amplitudes at large N and low energy. This line of reasoning also leads to a number of nontrivial predictions for the effective QED Lagrangian in either four or two dimensions at any loop order, and preliminary results of a calculation of the three-loop Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangian in two dimensions are presented.

Schwinger pair creation in Dirac semimetals in the presence of external magnetic and electric fields

We discuss the Schwinger pair creation process for the system of massless Dirac fermions in the presence of constant external magnetic and electric fields. The pair production rate remains finite unlike the vacuum decay rate. In the recently discovered Dirac semimetals, where the massless Dirac fermions emerge, this pair production may be observed experimentally through the transport properties. We estimate its contribution to the ordinary conductivity of the semimetals.

Multi-pair states in electron–positron pair creation

Ultra strong electromagnetic fields can lead to spontaneous creation of single or multiple electron-positron pairs. A quantum field theoretical treatment of the pair creation process combined with numerical methods provides a description of the fermionic quantum field state, from which all observables of the multiple electron-positron pairs can be inferred. This allows to study the complex multi-particle dynamics of electron-positron pair creation in-depth, including multi-pair statistics as well as momentum distributions and spin. To illustrate the potential benefit of this approach, it is applied to the intermediate regime of pair creation between nonperturbative Schwinger pair creation and perturbative multiphoton pair creation where the creation of multi-pair states becomes nonnegligible but cascades do not yet set in. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how spin and helicity of the created electrons and positrons are affected by the polarization of the counterpropagating laser fields, which induce the creation of electron-positron pairs.

NUT wormholes

We show that supercritically charged black holes with NUT provide a new setting for traversable wormholes. This does not require exotic matter, a price being the Misner string singularities. Without assuming time periodicity to make Misner strings unobservable, we show that, contrary to expectations, geodesics do not stop there. Moreover, since there is no central singularity the space-time turns out to be geodesically complete. Another unpleasant feature of spacetimes with NUTs is the presence of regions where the azimuthal angle $\varphi$ becomes timelike, signalling the appearance of closed timelike curves (CTCs). We show that among them there are no closed timelike or null geodesics, so the freely falling observers should not encounter causality violations. Considering worldlines of charged particles, we find that, although these can become closed in the vicinity of the wormhole throat for large enough charge-to-mass ratio, the non-causal orbits are still disconnected from the distant zones. All these findings support our feeling that wormholes with NUTs deserve to be taken seriously. Integrating the geodesic equations completely, we demonstrate the existence of timelike and null geodesics connecting two asymptotic regions of the wormhole, such that the tidal forces in the throat are reasonably small. We discuss bounds on the NUT charge which follow from the Schwinger pair creation and ionization thresholds and speculate that such NUT wormholes could be present in some galactic centers.

Comparison of semiclassical and Wigner function methods in pair production in rotating fields

We present a comparison of two methods to compute the momentum spectrum and the Schwinger pair creation rate for pulsed rotating electric fields: a numerical method based upon the real-time Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism and a semiclassical approximation based on a scattering ansatz. For the semiclassical method we propose to either perform numerical calculations or an additional approximation based on an analytical solution for the constant rotating field. We find that the two numerical methods are complementary with respect to computation time as well as accuracy. The approximate method shows the same qualitative features while being computationally much faster. We additionally find that the unequal production of pairs in different spin states reported for constant rotating fields with the scattering method is in agreement with the Wigner function method.

Semiclassical description of soliton-antisoliton pair production in particle collisions

We develop a consistent semiclassical method to calculate the probability of topological soliton-antisoliton pair production in collisions of elementary particles. In our method one adds an auxiliary external field pulling the soliton and antisoliton in the opposite directions. This transforms the original scattering process into a Schwinger pair creation of the solitons induced by the particle collision. One describes the Schwinger process semiclassically and recovers the original scattering probability in the limit of vanishing external field. We illustrate the method in (1+1)-dimensional scalar field model where the suppression exponents of soliton-antisoliton production in the multiparticle and two-particle collisions are computed numerically.

Schwinger effect and entanglement entropy in confining geometries

By using AdS/CFT, we study the critical electric field, the Schwinger pair creation rate and the potential phase diagram for the quark and anti quark in four confining supergravity backgrounds which are the Witten QCD, the Maldacena-Nunez, the Klebanov-Tseytlin and the Klebanov-Strassler models. We compare the rate of phase transition in these models and compare it also with the conformal case. We then present the phase diagrams of the entanglement entropy of a strip in these geometries and find the predicted butterfly shape in the diagrams. We find that the phase transitions have higher rate in WQCD and KT relative to MN and KS. Finally we show the effect of turning on an additional magnetic field on the rate of pair creation by using the imaginary part of the Euler-Heisenberg effective Lagrangian. The results is increasing the parallel magnetic field would increase the pair creation rate and increasing the perpendicular magnetic field would decrease the rate.

Effects of strain on the Schwinger pair creation in graphene

The effects of strain on mechanically deformed graphene are determined by looking at how the strain affects the amplitude of the Schwinger two particle pair state. The influences of the lattice distortions, such as isotropic tensile strain ϵis, shear strain ϵss, uniaxial armchair strain ϵas, and zigzag strain ϵzs, on the photon emission spectrum have been analyzed. We find that the intensities of the emission increases or decreases when compared to those of the unstrained graphene, depending on the type of strain applied. Thus the structure of energy band, the frequencies of the photons and the emission spectrum can be controlled by use of the different strains.

Holographic Schwinger effect in de Sitter space

Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we construct the holographic dual of a tunneling instanton describing Schwinger pair creation in de Sitter space. Our approach allows us to extract the critical value of the electric field for which the potential barrier disappears, rendering the vacuum unstable. In addition, we compute the large-$\lambda$, large-$N_c$ corrections to the nucleation rate and we find that it agrees with previous expectations based on perturbative computations. As a by-product of this investigation, we study the causal structure of the string dual to the nucleated pair as seen by different static observers and we show that it can be interpreted as a dynamical creation of a `gluonic' wormhole. We explain how this result provides further evidence for the ER=EPR conjecture as an equivalence between two descriptions of the same physical phenomenon.

Vlasov equation for Schwinger pair production in a time-dependent electric field

Schwinger pair creation in a purely time-dependent electric field can be described through a quantum Vlasov equation describing the time evolution of the single-particle momentum distribution function. This equation exists in two versions, both of which can be derived by a Bogoliubov transformation, but whose equivalence is not obvious. For the spinless case, we show here that the difference between these two evolution equations corresponds to the one between the "in-out" and "in-in" formalisms. We give a simple relation between the asymptotic distribution functions generated by the two Vlasov equations. As examples we discuss the Sauter and single-soliton field cases.