Analytical solutions of the Dirac equation in an external electromagnetic field are found such that according to the field-theoretic interpretation electron-positron pairs are trapped for a period of time. The naive one-particle interpretation of the Dirac wave function fails in this case completely. Simple electromagnetic field which produces this effect was undeniably concocted and may look artificial but the phenomenon of time traps seems real.
Ultra strong electromagnetic fields can lead to spontaneous creation of single or multiple electron-positron pairs. A quantum field theoretical treatment of the pair creation process combined with numerical methods provides a description of the fermionic quantum field state, from which all observables of the multiple electron-positron pairs can be inferred. This allows to study the complex multi-particle dynamics of electron-positron pair creation in-depth, including multi-pair statistics as well as momentum distributions and spin. To illustrate the potential benefit of this approach, it is ap…
It is shown that in the greatly simplified model of the mutually interacting electron-positron pairs and the electric field time-crystal structures can spontaneously form. For a special choice of parameters we find a periodic modulation of the pair number and the electric field.
The common tunneling picture of electron-positron pair creation in a strong electric field is generalized to pair creation in combined crossed electric and magnetic fields. This enhanced picture, being symmetric for electrons and positrons, is formulated in a gauge-invariant and Lorentz-invariant manner for quasistatic fields. It may be used to infer qualitative features of the pair creation process. In particular, it allows for an intuitive interpretation of how the presence of a magnetic field modifies and, in particular cases, even enhances pair creation. The creation of electrons and posit…
In this paper we show that electron-positron pairs can be pumped inexhaustibly with a constant production rate from the one dimensional potential well with oscillating depth or width. Bound states embedded in the the Dirac sea can be pulled out and pushed to the positive continuum, and become scattering states. Pauli block, which dominant the saturation of pair creation in the static super-critical potential well, can be broken by the ejection of electrons. We find that the width oscillating mode is more efficient that the depth oscillating mode. In the adiabatic limit, pair number as a functi…
The correlated motion of a positron surrounded by electrons is a fundamental many-body problem. We approach this by modeling the momentum density of annihilating electron-positron pairs using the framework of reduced density matrices, natural orbitals and natural geminals (electron-positron pair wave functions) of the quantum theory of many-particle systems. We find that an expression based on the natural geminals provides an exact, unique and compact expression for the momentum density. The natural geminals can be used to define and determine enhancement factors for enhancement models going b…
Electron-positron pair production in an oscillating Sauter potential is investigated in the framework of the computational quantum field theory. It is found that for a Sauter potential well with oscillating width and depth simultaneously, the phase difference between them has a great impact on the number of created electron-positron pairs. Optimal values of the phase difference corresponding to different oscillation frequencies are obtained. The optimal phase difference has a strong nonlinear dependence on oscillating frequency. When the potential well changes slowly, our results can be explai…
An electron-positron pair ($e^- e^+$) is created in vacuum above a critical electric field strength $E_{crt}$ which is quite large in the laboratory scale. The photon, thus the field, annihilates in the pair creation process. Here, we question if the pair creation (at $E=E_{crt}$) introduces a boundary condition in the electromagnetic state, e.g., similar to the one in angular or linear momentum. We show that introduction of such a reasonable condition yields approximately the well-known magnetic flux quanta which normally one obtains using different arguments.
Early-time electron-positron correlation in vacuum pair-production in an external field is investigated. The entangled electron and positron wave functions are obtained analytically in the configuration and momentum spaces. It is shown that, relative to that of the one-dimensional theory, two- and three-dimensional calculations yield enhanced spatial correlation and broadened momentum spectrum. In fact, at early times the electron and positron almost coincide spatially. The correlation also depends on the direction of the applied field. For the spatial correlation, the transverse correlation i…
Electron-positron pair production in an arbitrary polarized ultrastrong laser field is investigated in the first order perturbation approximation in which the Volkov states are used for convenient calculation of scattering amplitude and cross section. It is found surprisingly that the optimal pair production depends strongly on the polarization. For some cases of field parameters, the optimal field is elliptically polarized or evenly circularly polarized one, rather than the usual linear polarization as indicated by previous works. Some insights into pair generation are given and some interest…
It is demonstrated that a pair can be characterized under which mechanism it was created according to its conversion energy, a quantity defined as the sum of electron and its conjugate positron's mass-energy, in the study of electron-positron pair creation. The value of this quantity is checked with quantum field theoretical simulations for several field configurations and found that it can describe the creation process with rich physical picture, showing all the creation channels and giving the yields of each channel specifically. Evenly as a very convenient and powerful detection quantity it…
The momentum spectrum and the number density of created electron-positron pairs in a frequency modulated laser field are investigated using quantum kinetic equation. It is found that the momentum spectrum presents obvious interference pattern. This is an imprint of the frequency modulated field on the momentum spectrum, because the momentum peaks correspond to the pair production process by absorbing different frequency component photons. Moreover, the interference effect can also be understood qualitatively by analyzing turning point structures. The study of the pair number density shows that…
We study nonperturbative multiphoton electron-positron pair creation in ultrastrong electromagnetic fields formed by two counterpropagating pulses with elliptic polarization. Our numerical approach allows us to take into account the temporal as well as the spatial variation of the standing electromagnetic field. The spin and momentum resolved pair creation probabilities feature characteristic Rabi oscillations and resonance spectra. Therefore, each laser frequency features a specific momentum distribution of the created particles. We find that, depending on the relative polarization of both pu…
Resonant electron-positron pair production by a high-energy gamma quantum in the field of a nucleus and a quasi-monochromatic laser wave was theoretically studied. Under the resonant condition an intermediate virtual electron (positron) in the laser field becomes a real particle. Due to that fact the initial process of the second order in the fine structure constant in a laser field effectively reduces into two successive processes of the first order: the laser-stimulated Breit-Wheeler process and the laser-assisted process of an intermediate electron (positron) scattering by a nucleus. It is …
Classical and semi-classical energy states of relativistic electrons bounded by a massive and charged core with the charge-mass-radio Q/M and macroscopic radius R_c are discussed. We show that the energies of semi-classical (bound) states can be much smaller than the negative electron mass-energy (-mc^2), and energy-level crossing to negative energy continuum occurs. Electron-positron pair production takes place by quantum tunneling, if these bound states are not occupied. Electrons fill into these bound states and positrons go to infinity. We explicitly calculate the rate of pair-production, …
Electron-positron pair production, in combined Sauter potential wells and an oscillating one is imposed on a static Sauter potential, is investigated by using the computational quantum field theory. We find that the gain number (the difference of pair number under combined potentials to the simple addition of pair number for each potential) of the created pairs depends strongly on the depth of static potential and the frequency of oscillating potential. In particular, it is more sensitive to the frequency compared with the depth. For the low-frequency multiphoton regime, the gaining is almost …
The effect of linear chirp frequency on the process of electron-positron pairs production from vacuum in the combined potential wells is investigated by computational quantum field theory. Numerical results of electron number and energy spectrum under different frequency modulation parameters are obtained. By comparing with the fixed frequency, it is found that frequency modulation has a significant enhancement effect on the number of electrons. Especially when the frequency is small, appropriate frequency modulation enhances multiphoton processes in pair creation, thus promoting the pair crea…
