English

Pair Production Beyond the Schwinger Formula in Time-Dependent Electric Fields

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2008-12-18 v3

Abstract

We investigate electron-positron pair production in pulse-shaped electric background fields using a non-Markovian quantum kinetic equation. We identify a pulse-length range for subcritical fields still in the nonperturbative regime where the number of produced pairs significantly exceeds that of a naive expectation based on the Schwinger formula. From a conceptual viewpoint, we find a remarkable quantitative agreement between the (real-time) quantum kinetic approach and the (imaginary-time) effective action approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0807.2785,
  title  = {Pair Production Beyond the Schwinger Formula in Time-Dependent Electric Fields},
  author = {Florian Hebenstreit and Reinhard Alkofer and Holger Gies},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.2785},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures. Typos corrected and references added, PRD Version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:01:43.252Z