Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferometry in pair production from counterpropagating lasers

Abstract

The rate of electron-positron pair production in linearly polarized counter-propagating lasers is evaluated from a recently discovered solution of the time-dependent Dirac equation. The latter is solved in momentum space where it is formally equivalent to the Schrödinger equation describing a strongly driven two-level system. The solution is found from a simple transformation of the Dirac equation and is given in compact form in terms of the doubly-confluent Heun's function. By using the analogy with the two-level system, it is shown that for high-intensity lasers, pair production occurs through periodic non-adiabatic transitions when the adiabatic energy gap is minimal. These transitions give rise to an intricate interference pattern in the pair spectrum, reminiscent of the Landau-Zener-Stückelberg phenomenon in molecular physics: the accumulated phase result in constructive or destructive interference. The adiabatic-impulse model is used to study this phenomenon and shows an excellent agreement with the exact result.

22 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• The Stokes Phenomenon and Schwinger Vacuum Pair Production in Time-Dependent Laser Pulses
• Pair production in laser fields oscillating in space and time
• Interference Effects in Schwinger Vacuum Pair Production for Time-Dependent Laser Pulses
• Quark-antiquark production from classical fields in heavy ion collisions: 1+1 dimensions
• Non-perturbative vacuum-polarization effects in proton-laser collisions

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Resonantly enhanced pair production in a simple diatomic model
• Optimization of Schwinger pair production in colliding laser pulses
• Momentum distribution of particles created in space-time-dependent colliding laser pulses
• Time-domain quantum interference in graphene
• Time-rescaling of Dirac dynamics: shortcuts to adiabaticity in ion traps and Weyl semimetals