Calculations of vacuum mean values of spinor field current and energy-momentum tensor in a constant electric background

TL;DR

This paper investigates vacuum mean values of current and energy-momentum tensor for a quantized spinor field in a strong, constant electric background confined between capacitor plates, introducing new regularization methods and relating results to the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian.

Contribution

It presents novel renormalization and volume regularization procedures for nonperturbative calculations in strong-field QED with x-steps, specifically for the L-constant electric field.

Findings

Derived explicit expressions for vacuum mean values in the L-constant electric field.

Separated contributions from particle creation and vacuum polarization.

Connected these contributions to the renormalized Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian.

Abstract

In the framework of strong-field QED with $x$-steps, we study vacuum mean values of the current density and energy--momentum tensor of the quantized spinor field placed in the so-called $L$-constant electric background. The latter background can be, for example, understood as the electric field confined between capacitor plates, which are separated by a sufficiently large distance $L$. First, we reveal peculiarities of nonperturbative calculating of mean values in strong-field QED with $x$-steps in general and, in the $L$-constant electric field, in particular. We propose a new renormalization and volume regularization procedures that are adequate for these calculations. We find necessary representations for singular spinor functions in the external background under consideration. With their help, we calculate the above mentioned vacuum means. In the obtained expressions, we show how to separate global contributions due to the particle creation and local ones due to the vacuum polarization. We demonstrate how these contributions can be related to the renormalized effective Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian.