Notes on holographic Schwinger effect

TL;DR

This paper investigates the holographic Schwinger effect using probe brane methods, revealing its dependence on energy scales and noncommutative effects in different D3-brane configurations.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the conditions under which the holographic Schwinger effect occurs, especially in confining and noncommutative gauge theories.

Findings

Schwinger effect occurs above the Kaluza-Klein mass in confining D3-branes.

The effect is absent in 2+1 dimensional dual gauge theories.

Noncommutative effects modify the decay rate of the Schwinger effect.

Abstract

We use the method of evaluating the decay rate in terms of the imaginary part of a probe brane action to study the holographic Schwinger effect. In the confining D3-branes case, we find that the Schwinger effect occurs at energy scales higher than the Kaluza-Klein mass, indicating the absence of such effect when the dual gauge field theory can be regarded as an 2+1 dimensional theory. This property is independent of the configuration of the probe brane. In the case of D3-branes with a B field dual to a noncommutative super Yang-Mills theory, we study how the decay rate is affected by the noncommutative effect.