English

Currents of created pairs in strong electric fields

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-08-04 v3

Abstract

We calculate tree--level currents of created particles in strong background electric fields in 4D QED for various initial states. Namely, we do that in pulse background for initial vacuum and thermal states at past infinity. In both cases we find that the current grows linearly with the length of the pulse with coefficients of proportionality containing the characteristic Schwinger's factor. For the constant electric field background we calculate the current for several different initial states. We observe that in such a case the current is either zero or linearly divergent. We explain the reason for such a behaviour and compare the situation in ordinary and scalar QED. Finally, we calculate the current in two--dimensional situation in the presence of such settings when the so called Klein paradox can be observed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.00399,
  title  = {Currents of created pairs in strong electric fields},
  author = {E. T. Akhmedov and A. V. Anokhin and D. I. Sadekov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.00399},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

19 pages, minor changes, clarifying comments are added, misprints corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:38:05.914Z