No Arabic abstract
We isolate the two-step mechanism involving a real intermediate photon from the one-step mechanism involving a virtual photon for the trident process in a constant crossed field. The two-step process is shown to agree with an integration over polarised sub-processes. At low to moderate quantum non-linearity parameter, the one-step process is found to be suppressed. When the parameter is large, the two decay channels are comparable if the field dimensions are not much greater than the formation length.
We reexamine the process $gammato e^++ e^-$ in a background magnetic field comparable to $B_cequiv m_e^2/e$. This process is known to be non-perturbative in the magnetic-field strength. However, it can be shown that the {it moments} of the above pair production width is proportional to the derivatives of photon polarization function at the zero energy, which is perturbative in $B$. Hence, the pair-production width can be easily obtained from the latter by the inverse Mellin transform. The implications of our approach are discussed.
We study the non-perturbative production of gluon pairs from a constant SU(3) chromo-electric background field via the Schwinger mechanism. We fix the covariant background gauge with an arbitrary gauge parameter alpha. We determine the transverse momentum distribution of the gluons, as well as the total probability of creating pairs per unit space time volume. We find that the result is independent of the covariant gauge parameter alpha used to define arbitrary covariant background gauges. We find that our non-perturbative result is both gauge invariant and gauge parameter alpha independent.
We study nonlinear trident in laser pulses in the high-energy limit, where the initial electron experiences, in its rest frame, an electromagnetic field strength above Schwingers critical field. At lower energies the dominant contribution comes from the two-step part, but in the high-energy limit the dominant contribution comes instead from the one-step term. We obtain new approximations that explain the relation between the high-energy limit of trident and pair production by a Coulomb field, as well as the role of the Weizsacker-Williams approximation and why it does not agree with the high-$chi$ limit of the locally-constant-field approximation. We also show that the next-to-leading order in the large-$a_0$ expansion is, in the high-energy limit, nonlocal and is numerically very important even for quite large $a_0$. We show that the small-$a_0$ perturbation series has a finite radius of convergence, but using Pade-conformal methods we obtain resummations that go beyond the radius of convergence and have a large numerical overlap with the large-$a_0$ approximation. We use Borel-Pade-conformal methods to resum the small-$chi$ expansion and obtain a high precision up to very large $chi$. We also use newer resummation methods based on hypergeometric/Meijer-G and confluent hypergeometric functions.
We study the trident process in laser pulses. We provide exact numerical results for all contributions, including the difficult exchange term. We show that all terms are in general important for a short pulse. For a long pulse we identify a term that gives the dominant contribution even if the intensity is only moderately high, $a_0gtrsim1$, which is an experimentally important regime where the standard locally-constant-field (LCF) approximation cannot be used. We show that the spectrum has a richer structure at $a_0sim1$, compared to the LCF regime $a_0gg1$. We study the convergence to LCF as $a_0$ increases and how this convergence depends on the momentum of the initial electron. We also identify the terms that dominate at high energy.
We consider stimulated pair production employing strong-field QED in a high-intensity laser background. In an infinite plane wave, we show that light-cone quasi-momentum can only be transferred to the created pair as a multiple of the laser frequency, i.e. by a higher harmonic. This translates into discrete resonance conditions providing the support of the pair creation probability which becomes a delta-comb. These findings corroborate the usual interpretation of multi-photon production of pairs with an effective mass. In a pulse, the momentum transfer is continuous, leading to broadening of the resonances and sub-threshold behaviour. The peaks remain visible as long as the number of cycles per pulse exceeds unity. The resonance patterns in pulses are analogous to those of a diffraction process based on interference of the produced pairs.