Interference Effects in Schwinger Vacuum Pair Production for Time-Dependent Laser Pulses

TL;DR

This paper introduces simple approximate formulas for scalar and spinor QED vacuum pair production in time-dependent electric fields, emphasizing interference effects from multiple semiclassical turning points, useful for designing laser pulses with enhanced particle yields.

Contribution

It provides new, easy-to-implement semiclassical formulas that incorporate interference effects for vacuum pair production under arbitrary time-dependent electric fields.

Findings

Formulas account for interference from multiple turning points.

Interference effects significantly influence particle momentum spectra.

Applicable to various fields involving time-dependent tunneling phenomena.

Abstract

We present simple new approximate formulas, for both scalar and spinor QED, for the number of particles produced from vacuum by a time dependent electric field, incorporating the interference effects that arise from an arbitrary number of distinct semiclassical turning points. Such interference effects are important when the temporal profile of the laser pulse has subcycle structure. We show how the resulting semiclassical intuition may be used to guide the design of temporal profiles that enhance the momentum spectrum due to interference effects. The result is easy to implement and generally applicable to time-dependent tunneling problems, such as appear in many other contexts in particle and nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, atomic physics, chemical physics, and gravitational physics.