Semiclassical Calculation of Photon-Stimulated Schwinger Pair Creation

TL;DR

This paper presents a semiclassical approach to calculating photon-stimulated Schwinger pair creation rates in a constant electric field, including new contributions for orthogonal photon polarization and arbitrary photon energies.

Contribution

It introduces a purely quasiclassical method to compute pair creation rates, revealing new polarization-dependent effects and extending results to arbitrary photon energies.

Findings

Calculated pair creation rates for different photon polarizations.

Identified a new leading contribution for orthogonal polarization.

Reproduced the exponential factor geometrically for arbitrary photon energies.

Abstract

We consider the electron-positron pair creation by a photon in an external constant electric field. The presented treatment is based on a purely quasiclassical calculation of the imaginary part of the on-shell photon polarization operator. By using this approach we find the pair production rate for photons with polarization parallel as well as orthogonal to the external electric field in the leading order in the parameter $eE / m ^ 2$, which has been recently found by other methods. For the orthogonal polarization we also find a new contribution to the rate, which is leading in the ratio of the photon energy to the electron mass $\omega/m$. We also reproduce by a purely geometrical calculation the exponential factor in the probability of the stimulated pair creation at arbitrary energy of the photon.