On the Gravitationally Induced Schwinger Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gravity influences the Schwinger mechanism for particle creation in strong electric fields within curved spacetime, using advanced heat kernel methods in quantum electrodynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative heat kernel expansion to compute gravitational corrections to Schwinger's particle production in curved spacetime.

Findings

Derived gravitational corrections to Schwinger's particle creation rate.

Extended Schwinger's result to include linear curvature effects.

Applied heat kernel techniques to quantum fields in curved backgrounds.

Abstract

In this paper we will present very recent results obtained in the ambit of quantum electrodynamics in curved spacetime. We utilize a newly developed non-perturbative heat kernel asymptotic expansion on homogeneous Abelian bundles over Riemannian manifolds in order to compute the one-loop effective action for scalar and spinor fields in curved spacetime under the influence of a strong covariantly constant electromagnetic field. In this framework we derived, in particular, the gravitational corrections, up to linear terms in Riemannian curvature, to Schwinger's result for the creation of particles in a strong electric field.