Multidimensional Worldline Instantons

Aug, 2006
22 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.D 74 (2006) 065015
e-Print:

Citations per year

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Abstract:
We extend the worldline instanton technique to compute the vacuum pair production rate for spatially inhomogeneous electric background fields, with the spatial inhomogeneity being genuinely two or three dimensional, both for the magnitude and direction of the electric field. Other techniques, such as WKB, have not been applied to such higher dimensional problems. Our method exploits the instanton dominance of the worldline path integral expression for the effective action.
  • 11.27.+d
  • 12.20.Ds
  • instanton
  • pair production
  • electric field: background field
  • fluctuation: operator
  • effective action
  • quantum electrodynamics: scalar
  • numerical calculations