Discrete worldline instantons
High Energy Physics - Theory
2018-10-17 v2
Abstract
The semiclassical approximation of the worldline path integral is a powerful tool to study nonperturbative electron-positron pair creation in spacetime-dependent background fields. Finding solutions of the classical equations of motion, i.e. worldline instantons, is possible analytically only in special cases, and a numerical treatment is nontrivial as well. We introduce a completely general numerical approach based on an approximate evaluation of the discretized path integral that easily and robustly gives the full semiclassical pair production rate in nontrivial multi-dimensional fields, and apply it to some example cases.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1806.00943,
title = {Discrete worldline instantons},
author = {Christian Schneider and Greger Torgrimsson and Ralf Schützhold},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.00943},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
13 pages, 14 figures. Version 2: added references and a new example