Spontaneous generation of spin current from the vacuum by strong electric fields
Abstract
We discuss spontaneous spin current generation from the vacuum by strong electric fields as a result of interplay between the Schwinger mechanism and a spin-orbit coupling. By considering a homogeneous slow strong electric field superimposed by a fast weak transverse electric field, we explicitly evaluate the vacuum expectation value of a spin current (the Bargmann-Wigner spin current) by numerically solving the Dirac equation. We show that a non-vanishing spin current polarized in the direction perpendicular to the electric fields flows mostly in the longitudinal direction. We also find that a relativistic effect due to the helicity conservation affects direction/polarization of spin current.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1904.07593,
title = {Spontaneous generation of spin current from the vacuum by strong electric fields},
author = {Xu-Guang Huang and Mamoru Matsuo and Hidetoshi Taya},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.07593},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
v2: 16 pages, 5 figures; discussions and references added