Worldline instantons and pair production in inhomogenous fields
By G. Dunne, C. Schubert. 2005
262 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We show how to do semiclassical nonperturbative computations within the worldline approach to quantum field theory using ``worldline instantons.'' These worldline instantons are classical solutions to the Euclidean worldline loop equations of motion, and are closed spacetime loops parametrized by the proper time. Specifically, we compute the imaginary part of the one-loop effective action in scalar QED using ``worldline instantons'' for a wide class of inhomogeneous electric field backgrounds. We treat both time-dependent and space-dependent electric fields and note that temporal inhomogeneities tend to shrink the instanton loops, while spatial inhomogeneities tend to expand them. This corresponds to temporal inhomogeneities tending to enhance local pair production, with spatial inhomogeneities tending to suppress local pair production. We also show how the worldline instanton technique extends to spinor QED.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cad4dadfc400f44dce596b7091c84af7518ae44
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Citations in the corpus
- Worldline instantons and the fluctuation prefactor (2006, methodology): “Furthermore, it was shown in [1] that these classical worldline instantons straightforwardly determine the nonperturbative exponential factor in ImΓMink, for inhomogeneous background electric fields.”
- Electron-positron pairs in physics and astrophysics: from heavy nuclei to black holes (2009, methodology): “Within the worldline formalism, Dunne and Schubert [48] calculated the exponential factor and Dunne et al.”
- Particle Production in Strong Electromagnetic Fields in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions (2013, unknown): “Following [22] I define the inhomogeneity parameter”