Spontaneous vacuum decay in low-energy collisions of heavy nuclei beyond the monopole approximation

Abstract

The problem of spontaneous vacuum decay in low-energy collisions of heavy nuclei is considered beyond the scope of the monopole approximation. The time-dependent Dirac equation is solved in a rotating coordinate system with $z$-axis directed along the internuclear line and the origin placed at the center of mass. The probabilities of electron-positron pair creation and the positron energy spectra are calculated in the approximation neglecting the rotational coupling. The two-center potential is expanded over spherical harmonics and the convergence with respect to the number of terms in this expansion is studied. The results show that taking into account the two-center potential instead of its spherically symmetric part preserves all the signatures of the transition to the supercritical regime that have been found in the framework of the monopole approximation and even enhances some of them.

8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (5)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Calculation of electron-positron production in supercritical uranium-uranium collisions near the Coulomb barrier
• Supercritical Dirac resonance parameters from extrapolated analytic continuation methods
• Electron-positron pair creation in low-energy collisions of heavy bare nuclei
• Electron-positron vacuum instability in strong electric fields. Relativistic semiclassical approach

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Angular and energy distributions of positrons created in subcritical and supercritical slow collisions of heavy nuclei
• Three-dimensional calculations of positron creation in supercritical collisions of heavy nuclei
• Positron supercritical resonances and spontaneous positron creation in slow collisions of heavy nuclei