Beta decay and other processes in strong electromagnetic fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strong electromagnetic fields influence quantum processes like nuclear beta-decay, providing a method to calculate probabilities and exploring effects in various field regimes, concluding that current fields have negligible impact.

Contribution

It introduces a simple calculation method for process probabilities in strong fields and analyzes beta-decay modifications under different electromagnetic conditions.

Findings

Field effects on beta-decay are too small to observe with current technology.

The paper provides a framework for calculating process probabilities in strong electromagnetic fields.

Field-induced acceleration of forbidden beta-decays is theoretically possible but practically unobservable.

Abstract

We consider effects of the fields of strong electromagnetic waves on various characteristics of quantum processes. After a qualitative discussion of the effects of external fields on the energy spectra and angular distributions of the final-state particles as well as on the total probabilities of the processes (such as decay rates and total cross sections), we present a simple method of calculating the total probabilities of processes with production of non-relativistic charged particles. Using nuclear beta-decay as an example, we study the weak and strong field limits, as well as the field-induced beta-decay of nuclei stable in the absence of the external fields, both in the tunneling and multi-photon regimes. We also consider the possibility of accelerating forbidden nuclear beta-decays by lifting the forbiddeness due to the interaction of the parent or daughter nuclei with the field of a strong electromagnetic wave. It is shown that for currently attainable electromagnetic fields all effects on total beta-decay rates are unobservably small.