Schwinger pair production via instantons in strong electric fields
By Sang Pyo Kim, D. Page. 2000
135 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In the space-dependent gauge, each mode of the Klein-Gordon equation in a strong electric field takes the form of a time-independent Schr\{o}dinger equation with a potential barrier. We propose that the single- and multi-instantons of quantum tunneling may be related with the single- and multi-pair production of bosons and the relative probability for the no-pair production is determined by the total tunneling probability via instantons. In the case of a uniform electric field, the instanton interpretation recovers exactly the well-known pair production rate for bosons and when the Pauli blocking is taken into account, it gives the correct fermion production rate. The instanton is used to calculate the pair production rate even in an inhomogeneous electric field. Furthermore, the instanton interpretation confirms the fact that bosons and fermions can not be produced by a static magnetic field only.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a93ca7c3b0c8e32dd8c03fa654d101963d183846
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Electron-positron pairs in physics and astrophysics: from heavy nuclei to black holes (2009, background): “In Section 5, after recalling studies of pair production in inhomogeneous electromagnetic fields in the literature by [48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53], we present a brief review of our recent work [54] where the general formulas for pair production rate as functions of either crossing energy level or classi”