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Doubly assisted Sauter-Schwinger effect
Phys. Rev. D 94, 065035 – Published 26 September, 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.94.065035
Abstract
We study electron-positron pair creation by a strong and slowly varying electric field, assisted by a weaker and more rapidly changing field (e.g., in the keV regime) plus an additional high-energy (say MeV) photon. It turns out that this combination can yield a pair creation probability which is exponentially larger than in the case where one (or more) of the three ingredients is missing. Apart from a deeper understanding of these nonperturbative phenomena, this double enhancement may pave the way for an experimental verification of this fundamental prediction.
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Note that the doubly assisted Sauter-Schwinger effect is qualitatively and kinematically quite different from other phenomena such as the assisted Breit-Wheeler processes as studied in [9, 10], for example. The interaction of a high-energy photon with a field of the form (2) or (16) is very different from the interaction of a high-energy photon with a counter-propagating plane wave, even if this wave is decomposed of two or more frequencies [9, 10]. For example, electrons and positrons under the influence of the plane wave alone can be described by Volkov solutions and there is no pair creation (no Sauter-Schwinger effect) without the high-energy photon. Consistently, one cannot associate a Lorentz invariant measure to the field strength or the frequency of a plane wave and thus the threshold behavior found for the (doubly) assisted Sauter-Schwinger effect cannot occur.
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