Quantum unitary dynamics of a charged fermionic field and Schwinger effect
Abstract
In quantum field theory, particle creation occurs, in general, when an intense external field, such as an electromagnetic field, breaks time translational invariance. This leads to an ambiguity in the definition of the vacuum state. In cosmological backgrounds this ambiguity has been reduced by imposing that the quantization preserves the symmetries of the system and that the dynamics is unitarily implemented. In this work, we apply these requirements to the quantization of a massive charged fermionic field coupled to a classical time-dependent homogeneous electric field, extending previous studies done for a scalar field. We characterize the quantizations fulfilling the criteria above and we show that they form a unique equivalence class of unitarily related quantizations, which provide a well-defined number of created particles at all finite times.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.06843,
title = {Quantum unitary dynamics of a charged fermionic field and Schwinger effect},
author = {Álvaro Álvarez-Domínguez and Luis J. Garay and David García-Heredia and Mercedes Martín-Benito},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.06843},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
20 pages; v2: matches the version published on J. High Energ. Phys. 2021 (additional clarifications added)