Pair creation rates for one-dimensional fermionic and bosonic vacua

Abstract

We compare the creation rates for particle-antiparticle pairs produced by a supercritical force field for fermionic and bosonic model systems. The rates obtained from the Dirac and Klein-Gordon equations can be computed directly from the quantum-mechanical transmission coefficients describing the scattering of an incoming particle with the supercritical potential barrier. We provide a unified framework that shows that the bosonic rates can exceed the fermionic ones, as one could expect from the Pauli-exclusion principle for the fermion system. This imbalance for small but supercritical forces is associated with the occurrence of negative bosonic transmission coefficients of arbitrary size for the Klein-Gordon system, while the Dirac coefficient is positive and bound by unity. We confirm the transmission coefficients with time-dependent scattering simulations. For large forces, however, the fermionic and bosonic pair-creation rates are surprisingly close to each other. The predicted pair creation rates also match the slopes of the time-dependent particle probabilities obtained from large-scale ab initio numerical simulations based on quantum field theory.

Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems

“…Studies of spin effects in pair production by a high-energy photon and a strong laser field were performed in Tsai, 1993 andIvanov et al, 2005, based on considerations on helicity amplitudes and on the spinpolarization vector, respectively. Characteristic differences between fermionic and bosonic particles have been revealed with respect to pair creation in an oscillating electric field and in recent studies of the Klein paradox (Cheng et al, 2009b;Krekora et al, 2004;Wagner et al, 2010a). In the latter case it was shown that the existence of a fermionic (bosonic) particle in the initial state leads to suppression (enhancement) of the pair production probability due to the different quantum statistics.…”

Instantaneous rest-frame transformation method for temporally induced pair creation

“…for fermions (T F ) and bosons (T B ), respectively [27]. Here p(E) and q(E) are the momenta of the particles at a point where V (x) = 0 and V (x) = V 0 and are equal to…”

Enhanced Schwinger pair production in many-centre systems

“…This model is very simple but it contains the main physical features required to understand the variations in the pair production rate. Other 1-D models have been considered in the literature [21,29,20,30] while an analytical approach to the relativistic ionization of a 3D two-center system can be found in [31]. This article is organized as follows.…”