Fermion production in Coulomb field on de Sitter universe

TL;DR

This paper investigates fermion pair production in a Coulomb field within de Sitter space, revealing how the universe's expansion influences particle creation, helicity conservation, and the transition to Minkowski space.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculation of fermion pair production probabilities in a Coulomb field on de Sitter space, including effects of expansion and helicity non-conservation.

Findings

Pair production probability depends on the expansion factor.

Momentum modulus is not conserved in de Sitter space.

In the Minkowski limit, pair production amplitude vanishes.

Abstract

Fermion production in an external Coulomb field on de Sitter expanding universe is studied. The amplitude and probability of pair production in an external Coulomb field are computed and the cases of large/small values of the expansion factor comparatively with the particle mass are studied. We obtain from our calculations that the modulus of the momentum is no longer a conserved quantity. We find that in the de Sitter space there are probabilities for production processes where the helicity is no longer conserved. For a vanishing expansion factor we recover the Minkowski limit where the amplitude of this process vanishes. The rate of pair production in Coulomb field is found to be important in the early universe when the expansion factor was large comparatively with the particle mass.