Vacuum superconductivity, conventional superconductivity and Schwinger pair production

Abstract

In a background of a very strong magnetic field a quantum vacuum may turn into a new phase characterized by anisotropic electromagnetic superconductivity. The phase transition should take place at a critical magnetic field of the hadronic strength (B_c \approx 10^{16} Tesla or eB_c \approx 0.6 GeV^2). The transition occurs due to an interplay between electromagnetic and strong interactions: virtual quark-antiquark pairs popup from the vacuum and create -- due to the presence of the intense magnetic field -- electrically charged and electrically neutral spin-one condensates with quantum numbers of ρmesons. The ground state of the new phase is a complicated honeycomblike superposition of superconductor and superfluid vortex lattices surrounded by overlapping charged and neutral condensates. In this talk we discuss similarities and differences between the superconducting state of vacuum and conventional superconductivity, and between the magnetic-field-induced vacuum superconductivity and electric-field-induced Schwinger pair production.

15 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables; plenary talk at Quantum Field Theory Under the Influence of External Conditions 2011 (QFEXT11), Benasque, Spain, September 18-24, 2011

References in corpus (13)

• The Chiral Magnetic Effect
• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• QCD Phase Transition in a Strong Magnetic Background
• Superconductivity of QCD vacuum in strong magnetic field
• Spontaneous electromagnetic superconductivity of vacuum in strong magnetic field: evidence from the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model
• Superconductivity from gauge/gravity duality with flavor
• Vector meson form factors and their quark-mass dependence
• Pseudoscalar and vector meson form factors from lattice QCD
• Measuring the magnetic birefringence of vacuum: the PVLAS experiment
• Vacuum as a hyperbolic metamaterial
• Magnetic moments of vector, axial, and tensor mesons in lattice QCD
• Strong-Field QED and High Power Lasers
• Neutral gluon polarization tensor in color magnetic background at finite temperature

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Deconfinement in the presence of a strong magnetic background: an exercise within the MIT bag model
• Large Nc Deconfinement Transition in the Presence of a Magnetic Field
• Thermal chiral and deconfining transitions in the presence of a magnetic background
• Electromagnetic superconductivity of vacuum induced by strong magnetic field