Related papers: On the Schwinger effect during axion inflation
We study the explosive production of gauge fields during axion inflation in a novel gradient expansion formalism that describes the time evolution of a set of bilinear electromagnetic functions in position space. Based on this formalism, we…
We present the first lattice simulations of the nonlinear evolution after axion inflation by self-consistently incorporating currents arising from Schwinger pair production. The tachyonically amplified gauge fields trigger the growth of…
We point out an enhancement of the pair production rate of charged fermions in a strong electric field in the presence of time dependent classical axion-like background field, which we call axion assisted Schwinger effect. While the…
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…
Non-Abelian gauge fields may exist during inflation. We study the Schwinger effect by an $SU(2)$ gauge field coupled to a charged scalar doublet in a (quasi) de Sitter background and the possible backreaction of the generated charged…
Previous studies demonstrate that the inflaton, when coupled to the hypercharge Chern-Simons density, can source an explosive production of helical hypermagnetic fields. Then, in the absence of fermion production, those fields have the…
Axion inflation coupled to the Standard Model (SM) hypercharge gauge sector represents an attractive scenario for the generation of primordial hypermagnetic fields. The description of this scenario is, however, complicated by the Schwinger…
In a class of (pseudoscalar) inflation, inflationary phase is followed by a kination phase, where the Universe is dominated by the kinetic energy of the inflaton that runs away in a vanishing scalar potential. In this class of…
Axions play a central role in many realizations of large field models of inflation and in recent alternative mechanisms for generating primordial tensor modes in small field models. If these axions couple to gauge fields, the coupling…
Particle production in strong electromagnetic fields is a recurring theme in solid state physics, heavy ion collisions, early universe cosmology and formal quantum field theory. In this paper we discuss the Dirac equation in a background of…
In a four dimensional inflation theory, a persistent electric field can be established by making the inflaton coupled to the gauge field like a dilaton. We investigate the pair production of scalar particles in the inflaton-driven electric…
We study chirality production in the pseudoscalar inflation model of magnetogenesis taking into account the Schwinger effect and particle collisions in plasma in the relaxation time approximation. We consider the Schwinger production of one…
Models of axion inflation are particularly interesting since they provide a natural justification for the flatness of the potential over a super-Planckian distance, namely the approximate shift-symmetry of the inflaton. In addition, most of…
We study the generation of electromagnetic fields during inflation when the conformal invariance of Maxwell's action is broken by the kinetic coupling $f^{2}(\phi)F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu}$ of the electromagnetic field to the inflaton field…
We investigate the process of the Schwinger effect by axial coupling in the natural single-field inflation model in two parts. First we consider the Schwinger effect when the conformal invariance of Maxwell action should be broken by axial…
Particle production induced by a time-dependent background is well understood as the projection of the time-evolved initial state onto a set of final states. While the asymptotic initial and final states are well defined in the usual way,…
The dynamically assisted Schwinger effect, the generation of fermion-antifermion pairs in vacuum under a strong, slow-varying field and a weak, high-frequency field, has become a promising avenue to probe the vacuum structure and the…
Electron-positron pairs can be produced via the Schwinger mechanism in the presence of strong electric fields. In particular, the fields involved in $\alpha$ decay and nuclear fission are strong enough to produce them. The energy of the…
The motion of a pseudo-scalar field $X$ during inflation naturally induces a significant amplification of the gauge fields to which it is coupled. The amplified gauge fields can source characteristic scalar and tensor primordial…
We investigate pair creation by an electric field in four-dimensional de Sitter space. The expectation value of the induced current is computed, using the method of adiabatic regularization. Under strong electric fields the behavior of the…