Fast Vacuum Decay into Quark Pairs in Strong Color Electric and Magnetic Fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates the rapid decay of the vacuum into quark pairs under strong color electromagnetic fields, highlighting the dominant role of the lowest Landau level and the effects of back reaction.

Contribution

It introduces an effective theory focusing on the lowest Landau level to analyze vacuum decay dynamics in strong color fields, including back reaction effects.

Findings

Vacuum decay rate is infinite for massless quarks in homogeneous color electromagnetic fields.

The lowest Landau level dominates the pair creation process.

Back reaction influences the vacuum decay dynamics.

Abstract

We study quark-pair creations in strong color electromagnetic fields. We point out that, for massless quarks, the vacuum persistency probability per unit space-time volume is zero, i.e., the quark-pair creation rate w is infinite, in general homogeneous color electromagnetic fields, while it is finite when the color magnetic field is absent. We find that the contribution from the lowest Landau level (LLL) dominates this phenomenon. With an effective theory of the LLL projection, we also discuss dynamics of the vacuum decay, taking into account the back reaction of pair creations.