Hartin, A;
Ringwald, A;
Tapia, N;
(2019)
Measuring the boiling point of the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics.
Physical Review D
, 99
(3)
, Article 036008. 10.1103/PhysRevD.99.036008.
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Abstract
It is a long-standing nontrivial prediction of quantum electrodynamics that its vacuum is unstable in the background of a static, spatially uniform electric field and, in principle, sparks with spontaneous emission of electron-positron pairs. However, an experimental verification of this prediction seems out of reach because a sizeable rate for spontaneous pair production requires an extraordinarily strong electric field strength jEj of order the Schwinger critical field, Ec ¼ m2 e=e ≃ 1.3 × 1018 V=m, where me is the electron mass and e is its charge. Here, we show that the measurement of the rate of pair production due to the decays of high-energy bremsstrahlung photons in a high-intensity laser field allows for the experimental determination of the Schwinger critical field and, thus, the boiling point of the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Measuring the boiling point of the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevD.99.036008 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.036008 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10070057 |
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