A holographic description of the Schwinger effect in a confining gauge theory

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent holographic approaches to the Schwinger effect, highlighting critical electric fields in confining gauge theories and their impact on vacuum stability and pair production rates.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic framework for analyzing the Schwinger effect in confining phases, including new critical electric field exponents and numerical computations.

Findings

Identification of a critical electric field related to string tension

Numerical calculation of pair production rates

Discovery of a non-perturbatively stable vacuum below a critical field

Abstract

This is a review of the recent progress on a holographic description of the Schwinger effect. In 2011, Semenoff and Zarembo proposed a scenario to study the Schwinger effect in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The production rate of quark anti-quark pairs was computed in the Coulomb phase. In particular, it provided the critical value of external electric field, above which particles are freely created and the vacuum decays catastrophically. Then the potential analysis in the holographic approach was invented and it enabled us to study the Schwinger effect in the confining phase as well. A remarkable feature of the Schwinger effect in the confining phase is to exhibit another kind of the critical value, below which the pair production cannot occur and the vacuum of the system is non-perturbatively stable. The critical value is tantamount to the confining string tension. We computed the pair production rate numerically and introduced new exponents associated with the critical electric fields.