Discrete worldline instantons

Abstract

The semiclassical approximation of the worldline path integral is a powerful tool to study nonperturbative electron-positron pair creation in spacetime-dependent background fields. Finding solutions of the classical equations of motion, i.e. worldline instantons, is possible analytically only in special cases, and a numerical treatment is nontrivial as well. We introduce a completely general numerical approach based on an approximate evaluation of the discretized path integral that easily and robustly gives the full semiclassical pair production rate in nontrivial multi-dimensional fields, and apply it to some example cases.

13 pages, 14 figures. Version 2: added references and a new example

References in corpus (8)

• Dynamically assisted Schwinger mechanism
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Cited by in corpus (19)

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• Toward the observation of interference effects in nonlinear Compton scattering
• Total yield of electron-positron pairs produced from vacuum in strong electromagnetic fields: validity of the locally constant field approximation
• Study of pair production in inhomogeneous two-color electric fields using the computational quantum field theory
• Quasinormal modes in kink excitations and kink-antikink interactions: a toy model
• Worldline instantons for nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production and Compton scattering
• Perturbative methods for assisted nonperturbative pair production
• Worldline instantons for the momentum spectrum of Schwinger pair production in space-time dependent fields
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• Schwinger pair production in spacetime fields: Moiré patterns, Aharonov-Bohm phases and Sturm-Liouville eigenvalues
• Nonadiabatic quantum Vlasov equation in spinor QED
• In-in worldline formalism in pair creating fields
• Nonadiabatic quantum kinetic equations and Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism for Schwinger pair production in time-varying electric fields with multiple components