Electron-positron pairs in physics and astrophysics: from heavy nuclei to black holes

TL;DR

This paper reviews the interplay of fundamental quantum processes like vacuum polarization and pair production in strong fields, linking laboratory experiments with astrophysical phenomena such as black hole formation and gamma-ray bursts.

Contribution

It synthesizes theoretical, experimental, and observational results across physics and astrophysics, emphasizing the role of these processes in black hole formation and high-energy astrophysical events.

Findings

Vacuum polarization and pair production are crucial in black hole physics.

Laboratory experiments and astrophysical observations complement each other.

These processes are essential for understanding gravitational collapse to black holes.

Abstract

From the interaction of physics and astrophysics we are witnessing in these years a splendid synthesis of theoretical, experimental and observational results originating from three fundametal physical processes. They were originally proposed by Dirac, by Breit and Wheeler and by Sauter, Heisenberg, Euler and Schwinger. The vacuum polarization process in strong electromagnetic field, pioneered by Sauter, Heisenberg, Euler and Schwinger, introduced the concept of critical electric field. It has been searched without success for more than forty years by heavy-ion collisions in many of the leading particle accelerators worldwide. The novel situation today is that these same processes can be studied on a much more grandiose scale during the gravitational collapse leading to the formation of a black hole being observed in Gamma Ray Bursts. This report is dedicated to the scientific race in act. The theoretical and experimental work developed in Earth-based laboratories is confronted with the theoretical interpretation of space-based observations of phenomena originating on cosmological scales. What has become clear in the last ten years is that all the three above mentioned processes, duly extended in the general relativistic framework, are necessary for the understanding of the physics of the gravitational collapse to a black hole. Vice versa, the natural arena where these processes can be observed in mutual interaction and on an unprecedented scale, is indeed the realm of relativistic astrophysics.