Speaker
Description
A well-known effect in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is the Schwinger pair production effect, describing the rate of production Γ of e+ e− particles out of the vacuum in a constant background electric field. This effect also occurs in curved space-times in the presence of an electric field, an example of which is the Schwinger effect in a two-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space-time (AdS2) with a constant electric field. The importance of the AdS2 space-time lies in the fact that the near-horizon geometry of asymptotically flat extremal black holes in four space-time dimensions takes the form of a product geometry AdS2×S^2 and is entirely determined in terms of the electric-magnetic charges carried by the black hole. We study the pair production of charged particles in these AdS_2×S^2 geometries with a view to gaining new insights into extremal black hole entropy and its subleading corrections.
