Fermion particle production in semi-classical Boltzmann-Vlasov transport theory

TL;DR

This paper numerically solves the semi-classical Boltzmann-Vlasov equation for fermion pair production in strong electric fields, comparing results with quantum field theory to validate the approach for potential QCD applications.

Contribution

It demonstrates the effectiveness of the Boltzmann-Vlasov method in modeling fermion production and suggests its extension to QCD for studying back-reaction effects.

Findings

Good agreement between Boltzmann-Vlasov and quantum field theory results.

Validation of semi-classical approach for fermion production.

Potential for QCD back-reaction studies.

Abstract

We present numerical solutions of the semi-classical Boltzmann-Vlasov equation for fermion particle-antiparticle production by strong electric fields in boost-invariant coordinates in (1+1) and (3+1) dimensional QED. We compare the Boltzmann-Vlasov results with those of recent quantum field theory calculations and find good agreement. We conclude that extending the Boltzmann-Vlasov approach to the case of QCD should allow us to do a thorough investigation of how back-reaction affects recent results on the dependence of the transverse momentum distribution of quarks and anti-quarks on a second Casimir invariant of color SU(3).