Worldline instantons and the fluctuation prefactor
By G. Dunne, H. Gies, C. Schubert, Qing-hai Wang. 2006
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In a previous paper [G. V. Dunne and C. Schubert, Phys. Rev. D 72, 105004 (2005).], it was shown that the worldline expression for the nonperturbative imaginary part of the QED effective action can be approximated by the contribution of a special closed classical path in Euclidean spacetime, known as a worldline instanton. Here we extend this formalism to compute also the prefactor arising from quantum fluctuations about this classical closed path. We present a direct numerical approach for determining this prefactor, and we find a simple explicit formula for the prefactor in the cases where the inhomogeneous electric field is a function of just one spacetime coordinate. We find excellent agreement between our semiclassical approximation, conventional WKB, and recent numerical results using numerical worldline loops.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d86b3c5a5274c12a824b96cfb6d45876550fe28c
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Citations in the corpus
- Electron-positron pairs in physics and astrophysics: from heavy nuclei to black holes (2009, background): “[49] gave the associated prefactor for various field configurations: for instance a spatially uniform, and single-pulse field with a temporal Sauter shape ∝ 1/ cosh2 ωt.”