Related papers: Virtual and Thermal Schwinger Processes
The Schrodinger motion of a charged quantum particle in an electromagnetic potential can be simulated by the paraxial dynamics of photons propagating through a spatially inhomogeneous medium. The inhomogeneity induces geometric effects that…
Spontaneous pair production from background fields or spacetimes is one of the most prominent phenomena predicted by quantum field theory. The Schwinger mechanism of production of charged pairs by a strong electric field and the Hawking…
We analyze magnetic flux tubes at zero temperature in a superconductor that is coupled to a superfluid via both density and gradient (``entrainment'') interactions. The example we have in mind is high-density nuclear matter, which is a…
Particle-antiparticle pairs can be produced by background electric fields via the Schwinger mechanism provided they are unconfined. If, as in QED in (3+1)-$d$ these particles are massive, the particle production rate is exponentially…
The contribution from quantum vacuum fluctuations of a real massless scalar field to the motion of a test particle that interacts with the field in the presence of a perfectly reflecting flat boundary is here investigated. There is no…
Membrane nucleation, a higher dimensional analog of the Schwinger effect, is a useful toy model for vacuum decay. While a non-perturbative effect, the computation of nucleation rates has only been accomplished at weak coupling in the field…
Electron motion on the (sub-)femtosecond time scale constitutes the fastest response in many natural phenomena such as light-induced phase transitions and chemical reactions. Whereas static electron densities in single molecules can be…
When the vacuum state of a scalar or electromagnetic field is modified by the presence of a reflecting boundary, an interacting test particle undergoes velocity fluctuations. Such effect is regarded as a sort of quantum analog of the…
We consider finite temperature 1-loop diagrams with hard loop momenta and an arbitrary number of external gauge fields when the external momenta are either soft, or near the light cone and nearly collinear with the loop momentum. We obtain…
We revisit the efficiency of Schwinger mechanism in creating charged pairs during inflation. We consider a minimal setup of inflation in which the inflaton field is a complex scalar field charged under a $U(1)$ gauge field. There is a time…
We analyze vacuum tunneling in quantum field theory in a general formalism by using the Wigner representation. In the standard instanton formalism, one usually approximates the initial false vacuum state by an eigenstate of the field…
When a quantum system is coupled to several heat baths at different temperatures, it eventually reaches a non-equilibrium steady state featuring stationary internal heat currents. These currents imply that entropy is continually being…
This thesis applies techniques from quantum field theory in curved spacetimes to study particle creation in external fields, focusing on the Schwinger effect (i.e., the production of particle-antiparticle pairs by intense electric fields).…
We derive a system of coupled partial differential equations for the equal-time Wigner function in an arbitrary strong electromagnetic field using the Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism. In the electrostatic limit, we present a 3+1-system of…
We propose a new Sauter-like field model with combinatorial multiple potentials consisting of a deep slow-varying and some shallow fast-varying potentials. The dynamically assisted Sauter-Schwinger effect on the pair production is found by…
The interaction of charged particles and photons with intense electromagnetic fields gives rise to multi-photon Compton and Breit-Wheeler processes. These are usually described in the framework of the external field approximation, where the…
The process of electron-positron pair production is investigated within the phase-space Wigner formalism. The similarities between atomic ionization and pair production for homogeneous, but time-dependent linearly polarized electric fields…
Finite temperature instantons between meta-stable vacua of correlated electronic system are solved analytically for quasi one-dimensional Hubbard model. The instantons produce dynamic symmetry breaking and connect metallic state with the…
Particle-antiparticle pairs are predicted by quantum field theory to appear as vacuum fluctuations. The model of the vacuum used here is postulated to have the following properties: To minimize the violation of conservation energy allowed…
We calculate the momentum spectrum of electron-positron pairs created via the Schwinger mechanism by a class of four-dimensional electromagnetic fields called e-dipole fields. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the…