Thermally-induced vacuum instability in a single plane wave

Abstract

Ever since Schwinger published his influential paper [J. Schwinger, Phys. Rev. \textbf{82}, 664 (1951)], it has been unanimously accepted that the vacuum is stable in the presence of an electromagnetic plane wave. However, we advance an analysis that indicates this statement is not rigorously valid in a real situation, where thermal effects are present. We show that the thermal vacuum, in the presence of a single plane-wave field, even in the limit of zero frequency (a constant crossed field), decays into electron-positron pairs. Interestingly, the pair-production rate is found to depend nonperturbatively on both the amplitude of the constant crossed field and on the temperature.

5 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Thermal Schwinger pair production at arbitrary coupling
• Pair production in differently polarized electric fields with frequency chirps
• Ponderomotive effects in multiphoton pair production
• Polarization operator for plane-wave background fields
• Vacuum high harmonic generation in the shock regime
• Linear Breit-Wheeler pair production by high-energy bremsstrahlung photons colliding with an intense X-ray laser pulse
• Strong-Field Breit-Wheeler Pair Production in Two Consecutive Laser Pulses with Variable Time Delay
• Interaction of photons traversing a slowly varying electromagnetic background
• Observing Thermal Schwinger Pair Production
• Worldline sphaleron for thermal Schwinger pair production
• Dimensionality-driven photoproduction of massive Dirac pairs near threshold in gapped graphene monolayers
• Particle production in a gravitational wave background
• Finite temperature Schwinger pair production in coexistent electric and magnetic fields
• One-photon pair-annihilation in pulsed plane-wave backgrounds
• Relativistic tunneling picture of electron-positron pair creation
• Vacuum pair-production in a classical electric field and an electromagnetic wave
• Impact of laser polarization on q-exponential photon tails in non-linear Compton scattering
• Thermally versus dynamically assisted Schwinger pair production
• Strong-field Breit-Wheeler pair production in ${\mathrm{QED}}_{2+1}$
• State of a particle pair produced by the Schwinger effect is not necessarily a maximally entangled Bell state
• Electromagnetic and gravitational radiation from the coherent oscillation of electron-positron pairs and fields