Worldline instantons for the momentum spectrum of Schwinger pair production in space-time dependent fields

Abstract

We show how to use the worldline-instanton formalism to calculate the momentum spectrum of the electron-positron pairs produced by an electric field that depends on both space and time. Using the LSZ reduction formula with a worldline representation for the propagator in a spacetime field, we make use of the saddle-point method to obtain a semiclassical approximation of the pair-production spectrum. In order to check the final result, we integrate the spectrum and compare with the results obtained using a previous instanton method for the imaginary part of the effective action.

16 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Worldline Instantons II: The Fluctuation Prefactor
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• Sauter-Schwinger effect for colliding laser pulses
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Kinetic theory of vacuum pair production in uniform electric fields revisited
• Evolution of chirality in a multiphoton pair production process
• Schwinger pair production in spacetime fields: Moiré patterns, Aharonov-Bohm phases and Sturm-Liouville eigenvalues
• Spirals, vortices, and helicity entanglements in dynamical Sauter-Schwinger pair creation
• In-in worldline formalism in pair creating fields