Worldline sphaleron for thermal Schwinger pair production

Gould, Oliver; Rajantie, Arttu; Xie, Cheng

Abstract

With increasing temperatures, Schwinger pair production changes from a quantum tunneling to a classical, thermal process, determined by a worldline sphaleron. We show this and calculate the corresponding rate of pair production for both spinor and scalar quantum electrodynamics, including the semiclassical prefactor. For electron-positron pair production from a thermal bath of photons and in the presence of an electric field, the rate we derive is faster than both perturbative photon fusion and the zero temperature Schwinger process. We work to all-orders in the coupling and hence our results are also relevant to the pair production of (strongly coupled) magnetic monopoles in heavy-ion collisions.

Citation

Gould, O., Rajantie, A., & Xie, C. (2018). Worldline sphaleron for thermal Schwinger pair production. Physical Review D, 98(5), 056022. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.98.056022

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 20, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Sep 25, 2018
• Publication Date: 2018
• Deposit Date: Jan 6, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 19, 2023
• Journal: Physical Review D
• Print ISSN: 2470-0010
• Electronic ISSN: 2470-0029
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 98
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 056022
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.98.056022
• Keywords: Finite temperature field theory, Monopoles, Nonperturbative effects in field theory, Quantum electrodynamics
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/6187518
• Publisher URL: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.056022
• Additional Information: (Received 20 June 2018; published 25 September 2018); ; Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.