Magnetic Field Effect on Charged Scalar Pair Creation at Finite Temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates how weak magnetic fields and finite temperature influence the decay of neutral scalar bosons into charged pairs, revealing that magnetic fields inhibit while temperature enhances pair production, with detailed vacuum and thermal analysis.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis isolating magnetic and thermal effects on scalar pair creation, highlighting the importance of particle spin and formalism in decay rate behavior.

Findings

Magnetic field inhibits pair production.

Temperature enhances pair production.

Vacuum and thermal effects show contrasting behaviors.

Abstract

In this work we explore the effects of a weak magnetic field and a thermal bath on the decay process of a neutral scalar boson into two charged scalar bosons. Our findings indicate that magnetic field inhibits while temperature enhances the pair production. The employed formalism allows us to isolate the contribution of magnetic fields in vacuum, leading to a separate analysis of the effects of different ingredients. This is essential since the analytical computation of the decay width necessarily needs of some approximation and the results that can be found in the literature are not always coincident. We perform the calculation in vacuum by two different weak field approximations. The particle pair production in vacuum was found to coincide with finite temperature behavior, which is opposite to results obtained by other authors in scenarios that involve neutral particles decaying into a pair of charged fermions. Among other differences between these scenarios, we traced that the analytical structure of the self-energy imposed by the spin of particles involved in the process is determinant in the behavior of the decay rate with the magnetic field.