Particle Creation in the Bell-Szekeres Spacetime

TL;DR

This paper studies quantum particle creation in a spacetime resulting from colliding electromagnetic waves, revealing that particles are produced during the interaction, with a spectrum similar to gravitational wave collisions.

Contribution

It demonstrates particle creation in the Bell-Szekeres spacetime using scalar field quantization, highlighting effects during electromagnetic wave collisions.

Findings

No particle creation before wave interaction

Particles are produced during the interaction

Spectrum resembles that of gravitational wave collisions

Abstract

The quantization of a real massless scalar field in a spacetime produced in a collision of two electromagnetic plane waves with constant wave fronts is considered. The background geometry in the interaction region, the Bell-Szekeres solution, is locally isometric to the conformally flat Bertotti-Robinson universe filled with a uniform electric field. It is shown that before the waves interact the Bogoliubov coefficients relating different observers are trivial and no vacuum polarization takes place. In the non- singular interaction region neutral scalar particles are produced with number of created particles and spectrum typical of gravitational wave collision.