Photon emission due to vacuum instability under the action of a quasi-constant electric field

TL;DR

This paper develops formulas for photon emission during vacuum instability caused by a strong, finite-duration electric field, analyzing emission characteristics and the applicability of the locally constant field approximation.

Contribution

It provides a nonperturbative framework for photon emission in strong-field QED under finite-duration fields, extending the locally constant field approximation.

Findings

Derived closed formulas for total photon emission probabilities.

Analyzed angular and polarization distributions of emitted photons.

Established the domain of validity for the locally constant field approximation.

Abstract

Following a nonperturbative formulation of strong-field QED developed in our earlier works, we consider photon emission accompanying vacuum instability under the action of a quasi-constant strong electric field of finite duration T. We construct closed formulas for the total probabilities and study the photon emission accompanying an electron-positron pair creation from a vacuum. We establish the domain of the applicability of the locally constant field approximation (LCFA) for the photon emission. We study angular and polarization distribution of the emission as well as emission characteristics in a high-frequency approximations with respect of 1/T. The results presented in this work is suitable to a further development of the LCFA proposed in [Phys. Rev. D 95, 076013 (2017)].