A proposal for testing subcritical vacuum pair production with high power lasers

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental setup using high-power lasers to test quantum field theory predictions of vacuum pair production below the Schwinger limit by detecting gamma rays from pair annihilation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental proposal to observe vacuum pair production with high-power lasers, exploring non-equilibrium quantum field effects below the Schwinger threshold.

Findings

Expected gamma ray signals depend on laser parameters

Estimated background gamma hits are manageable

Feasibility of detecting pair production with current laser technology

Abstract

We present a proposal for testing the prediction of non-equilibrium quantum field theory below the Schwinger limit. The proposed experiments should be able to detect a measurable number of gamma rays resulting from the annihilation of pairs in the focal spot of two opposing high intensity laser beams. We discuss the dependence of the expected number of gamma rays with the laser parameters and compare with the estimated background level of gamma hits for realistic laser conditions.