WKB approach to pair creation in spacetime-dependent fields

Abstract

Besides tunneling in static potential landscapes, for example, the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approach is a powerful nonperturbative approximation tool to study particle creation due to time-dependent background fields, such as cosmological particle production or the Sauter-Schwinger effect, i.e., electron-positron pair creation in a strong electric field. However, our understanding of particle creation processes in background fields depending on both space and time is rather incomplete. In order to venture into this direction, we propose a generalization of the WKB method to truly spacetime-dependent fields and apply it to the case of a spacetime-dependent mass.

15 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Sauter-Schwinger effect for colliding laser pulses
• Momentum spirals in multiphoton pair production revisited
• Study of pair production in inhomogeneous two-color electric fields using the computational quantum field theory
• Worldline instantons for nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production and Compton scattering
• Schwinger pair production rate and time for some space-dependent electromagnetic fields via worldline instantons formalism
• Electron-positron pair creation in the superposition of two oscillating electric field pulses with largely different frequency, duration and relative positioning
• Pair production in inhomogeneous electric fields with phase modulation
• Nonadiabatic quantum Vlasov equation in spinor QED
• Nonadiabatic quantum kinetic equations and Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism for Schwinger pair production in time-varying electric fields with multiple components
• Dynamics of charged spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles in superposed states minimally coupled to electromagnetism in curved spacetime within the WKB approximation