Speaker
Description
The instability of the vacuum in the presence of a strong static electric field that creates charged pairs is Schwinger pair production. In this talk we describe the classical field theory of pair creation using non-hermitian quantum mechanics. The Klein-Gordon equation in 1+1 dimensions in the presence of a constant electric field with an ansatz $\phi(x,t) = e^{-\mathrm{i}\omega t}\phi_{\omega}(x)$, can be mapped to an effective time independent Schr\"{o}dinger equation with a shifted inverted harmonic oscillator (IHO) potential. In this talk we address the question of implementing appropriate long distance physics (boundary condition at infinity) for the IHO that describes pair production using the philosophy of point particle effective field theory (PPEFT). The point particle effective action describes the local interaction of the high energy source. To the leading order, it amounts to adding a complex Dirac delta function at large distances which then fixes appropriate boundary condition for the wavefunction of the IHO at large distances in a renormalization group (RG) invariant way, that describes particle production. We derive Schwinger's pair production rate using the imaginary part of the point particle effective action that renders the emission probability RG invariant.
| Keyword-1 | Particle production |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Quantum mechanics |
