Nonequilibrium transport and statistics of Schwinger pair production in Weyl semimetals

Abstract

The non-equilibrium dynamics beyond linear response of Weyl semimetals is studied after a sudden switching on of a DC electric field. The resulting current is a nonmonotonic function of time, with an initial quick increase of polarization current followed by a power-law decay. Particle-hole creation à la Schwinger dominates for long times when the conduction current takes over the leading role, with the total current increasing again. The conductivity estimated from a dynamical calculation within a Drude picture agrees with the one obtained from Kubo's formula. The full distribution function of electron-hole pairs changes from Poissonian for short perturbations to a Gaussian in the long perturbation (Landau-Zener) regime. The vacuum persistence probability of high energy physics manifests itself in a finite probability of no pair creation and no induced current at all times.

7 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Exactly solvable cases in QED with t-electric potential steps
• Vacuum instability in slowly varying electric fields
• Chirality Production with Mass Effects-Schwinger Pair Production and the Axial Ward Identity
• Non-equilibrium transport in the pseudospin-1 Dirac-Weyl system
• Particle creation by peak electric field
• Spatially Assisted Schwinger Mechanism and Magnetic Catalysis
• Direct measurement of a beta function and an indirect check of the Schwinger effect near the boundary in Dirac-Weyl semimetals
• An experimental scheme for determining the Berry phase in two-dimensional quantum materials with a flat band
• Time dependent electric transport in nodal-loop semimetals
• Vacuum instability in time-dependent electric fields. New example of exactly solvable case