Currents of created pairs in strong electric fields

Abstract

We calculate tree--level currents of created particles in strong background electric fields in 4D QED for various initial states. Namely, we do that in pulse background for initial vacuum and thermal states at past infinity. In both cases we find that the current grows linearly with the length of the pulse with coefficients of proportionality containing the characteristic Schwinger's factor. For the constant electric field background we calculate the current for several different initial states. We observe that in such a case the current is either zero or linearly divergent. We explain the reason for such a behaviour and compare the situation in ordinary and scalar QED. Finally, we calculate the current in two--dimensional situation in the presence of such settings when the so called Klein paradox can be observed.

arXiv comment19 pages, minor changes, clarifying comments are added, misprints corrected

References in corpus (17)

• History and Physics of the Klein Paradox
• Vacuum instability in external fields
• Infrared Sensitivity of Unstable Vacua
• Lecture notes on interacting quantum fields in de Sitter space
• On the Instability of Global de Sitter Space to Particle Creation
• Quantum Vacuum Instability of 'Eternal' de Sitter Space
• Dirac fermions in strong electric field and quantum transport in graphene
• Interacting Field Theories in de Sitter Space are Non-Unitary
• One-loop energy-momentum tensor in QED with electric-like background
• Secularly growing loop corrections in strong electric fields
• Consistency restrictions on maximal electric field strength in QFT
• Scattering and pair creation by a constant electric field between two capacitor plates
• Schwinger Pair Production at Finite Temperature in QED
• Comments on QED with background electric fields
• Effective energy-momentum tensor of strong-field QED with unstable vacuum
• On quantization in background scalar fields
• The current density in quantum electrodynamics in time-dependent external potentials and the Schwinger effect

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Loop corrections to the current of created pairs in the lengthy electric pulse
• On generalization of 2d gravity with the simplest non-invariant states