Pair creation enhancement due to combined external fields

Abstract

We study the creation of electron-positron pairs from the vacuum induced by a combination of a static electric field and an alternating field. We find that the overall pair production can be increased by two orders of magnitude compared to the yields associated with each field individually. We examine the interesting case where both fields are spatially localized, permitting us to examine the time evolution of the spatial density for the created particle pairs. We find that there are a variety of competing mechanisms that contribute to the total yield.

Dynamically assisted Sauter-Schwinger effect in inhomogeneous electric fields

“…In these cases, the underlying (Dirac or Klein-Fock-Gordon) equation simplifies to an ordinary differential equation (allowing for a WKB approach, for example, see also [30][31][32][33][34]). However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no analytic non-perturbative results for fields E(t, x) which genuinely depend on space x and time t. So far, this case has only been treated numerically via the Wigner formalism (see, e.g., [35][36][37]) or a direct integration of the Dirac equation (see, e.g., [38][39][40]). This lack of understanding is not only unsatisfactory from a theoretical point of view.…”

Electron-positron pair production in a bifrequent oscillating electric field

“…In parallel, various mechanisms for compensating the suppression associated with the spontaneous creation of electron-positron pairs from the vacuum have been put forward [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Some of them have been motivated by the fact that pair production by multiphoton absorption has been observed using nonlinear Compton scattering [31].…”

Electron-positron pair production in external electric fields varying both in space and time

“…However, in order to study more general scenarios one has to consider higher-dimensional cases for which the corresponding calculation procedures should be designed. During the last few years a number of attempts have been made to examine the Schwinger effect in space-time-dependent configurations of external fields by means of various techniques [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. In Refs.…”

“…Besides, our approach was applied to the field configurations considered in Ref. [22] where it was shown that a special combination of spacetime-dependent pulses may significantly increase the pair-production rate. Our calculations reproduce the previous findings.…”

“…In Refs. [20][21][22] the Dirac equation, including the interaction with an external field, was solved numerically on a spatial grid. The corresponding solutions contain all the information needed to obtain observable quantities (this will be also discussed in Section II).…”