Capacitor Discharge and Vacuum Resistance in Massless QED_2

Abstract

A charged parallel plate capacitor will create particle-antiparticle pairs by the Schwinger process and discharge over time. We consider the full quantum discharge process in 1+1 dimensions including backreaction, when the electric field interacts with massless charged fermions. We recover oscillatory features in the electric field observed in a semiclassical analysis and find that the amplitude of the oscillations falls off as t^{-1/2} and that stronger coupling implies slower decay. Remarkably, Ohm's law applies to the vacuum and we evaluate the quantum electrical conductivity of the vacuum to be e/π^{1/2}, where e is the fermionic charge. Similarities and differences with black hole evaporation are mentioned.

8 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum anomalies and some recent developments
• Confining potential in a color dielectric medium with parallel domain walls

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Schwinger mechanism revisited
• On the Instability of Global de Sitter Space to Particle Creation
• Simulating fermion production in 1+1 dimensional QED
• Quantum Vacuum Instability of 'Eternal' de Sitter Space
• Dirac fermions in strong electric field and quantum transport in graphene
• Flux Discharge Cascades in Various Dimensions
• Connecting real-time properties of the massless Schwinger model to the massive case
• Quantum Backreaction on Classical Dynamics
• Instability of a uniform electric field in pure non-Abelian Yang-Mills theory
• Validity of One-Dimensional QED for a System with Spatial Symmetry
• Minkowski vacua can be metastable
• Unexciting non-Abelian electric fields
• Backreaction of Schwinger pair creation in massive QED${}_2$
• Continuum approach to real time dynamics of 1+1D gauge field theory: out of horizon correlations of the Schwinger model
• Response of the QED(2) Vacuum to a Quench: Long-term Oscillations of the Electric Field and the Pair Creation Rate
• Super-horizon resonant magnetogenesis during inflation
• Unexciting classical backgrounds
• Schwinger pair creation with the backreaction in 3 + 1 dimensions
• Long-time soliton dynamics via a coarse-grained space-time method
• Schwinger effect with backreaction in 1+1D massive QED with a strong external field