Schwinger effect for non-Abelian gauge bosons

Abstract

We investigate the Schwinger effect for the gauge bosons in an unbroken non-Abelian gauge theory (e.g. the gluons of QCD). We consider both constant "color electric" fields and "color magnetic" fields as backgrounds. As in the Abelian Schwinger effect we find there is production of "gluons" for the color electric field, but no particle production for the color magnetic field case. Since the non-Abelian gauge bosons are massless there is no exponential suppression of particle production due to the mass of the electron/positron that one finds in the Abelian Schwinger effect. Despite the lack of an exponential suppression of the gluon production rate due to the masslessness of the gluons, we find that the critical field strength is even larger in the non-Abelian case as compared to the Abelian case. This is the result of the confinement phenomenon on QCD.

arXiv comment15 pages revtex, contribution to IF-YITP GR+HEP+Cosmo International Symposium VI Naresuan University, Thailand

References in corpus (4)

• Schwinger mechanism revisited
• Soft-Gluon Production Due to a Gluon Loop in a Constant Chromo-Electric Background Field
• Non-Perturbative Gluon pair production from a Constant Chromo-Electric Field via the Schwinger Mechanism in Arbitrary Gauge
• Schwinger Mechanism for Gluon Pair Production in the Presence of Arbitrary Time Dependent Chromo-Electric Field

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