Related papers: Virtual and Thermal Schwinger Processes
Ever since Schwinger published his influential paper [J. Schwinger, Phys. Rev. \textbf{82}, 664 (1951)], it has been unanimously accepted that the vacuum is stable in the presence of an electromagnetic plane wave. However, we advance an…
We consider string pair production in non homogeneous electric backgrounds. We study several particular configurations which can be addressed with the Euclidean world-sheet instanton technique, the analogue of the world-line instanton for…
We analyze the spins of a Schwinger particle pair in a spatially uniform but time dependent electric field. The particle pair's spins are in the maximally entangled Bell state only if the particles' momenta are parallel to the electric…
The Hamiltonian describing fermion pair production from an arbitrarily time-varying electric field in two dimensions is studied using a group-theoretic approach. We show that this Hamiltonian can be encompassed by two, commuting SU(2)…
We study electron-positron pair production by the combination of a strong, constant electric field and a thermal background. We show that this process is similar to dynamically assisted Schwinger pair production, where the strong field is…
Far-from-equilibrium dynamics of SU(2) gauge theory with Wilson fermions is studied in 1+1 space-time dimensions using a real-time lattice approach. Lattice improved Hamiltonians are shown to be very efficient in simulating Schwinger pair…
Nucleation rates for tunneling processes in Minkowski and de Sitter space are investigated, taking into account one loop prefactors. In particular, we con- sider the creation of membranes by an antisymmetric tensor field, analogous to…
Instanton-like transitions (``shadow processes'') are considered in (1+1) dimensional models with one scalar field whose potential is a quadratic well with a cliff. The corresponding classical boundary value problem is solved, and the…
We study particle creation in a single pulse of an electric field in scalar quantum electrodynamics. We first identify parameter regions of the theory where the dynamical pair creation and Schwinger mechanism respectively dominate each…
We identify instantons representing vacuum decay in a 6-dimensional toy model for string theory flux compactifications, with the two extra dimensions compactified on a sphere. We evaluate the instanton action for tunneling between different…
When electric-type flux threads compact extra dimensions, a quantum nucleation event can break a flux line and initiate a cascade that unwinds many units of flux. Here, we present a novel mechanism for inflation based on this phenomenon.…
By using the first-principles approach, we derive a system of three quantum kinetic equations governing the production and evolution of charged scalar particles by an electric field in an expanding universe. Analyzing the ultraviolet…
We develop a consistent semiclassical method to calculate the probability of topological soliton-antisoliton pair production in collisions of elementary particles. In our method one adds an auxiliary external field pulling the soliton and…
We study the thermal depinning of single fluxons in rings made of Josephson junctions. Due to thermal fluctuations a fluxon can be excited from its energy minima and move through the array, causing a voltage across each junction. We find…
Real-time quantum simulation of quantum field theory in (3+1)D requires large quantum computing resources. With a few-qubit quantum computer, we develop a novel algorithm and experimentally study the Schwinger effect, the electron-positron…
In this work we postulate that Schwinger's threshold for a dynamic electric field intensity to induce spatial nonlinearity is a special case and, more generally, it is the threshold field for both static and dynamic electric fields. Fields…
We consider a refined version of the string-net model which assigns a different energy cost to each plaquette excitation. Using recent exact calculations of the energy-level degeneracies we compute the partition function of this model and…
The current flux density is a vector field that can be used to describe theoretically how electrons flow in a system out-of-equilibrium. In this work, we unequivocally demonstrate that the signal obtained from time-resolved X-ray scattering…
The problem of a massive elastic string depinning from a linear defect under the action of a small driving force is considered. To exponential accuracy the decay rate is calculated with the help of the instanton method; then, fluctuations…
We develop a new semiclassical approach, which starts with the density matrix given by the Euclidean time path integral with fixed coinciding endpoints, and proceed by identifying classical (minimal Euclidean action) path, to be referred to…