Interference effects in Schwinger vacuum pair production for time-dependent laser pulses

Abstract

We present simple new approximate formulas, for both scalar and spinor QED, for the number of particles produced from vacuum by a time-dependent electric field, incorporating the interference effects that arise from an arbitrary number of distinct semiclassical turning points. Such interference effects are important when the temporal profile of the laser pulse has subcycle structure. We show how the resulting semiclassical intuition may be used to guide the design of temporal profiles that enhance the momentum spectrum due to interference effects. The result is easy to implement and generally applicable to time-dependent tunneling problems, such as those that appear in many other contexts in particle and nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, atomic physics, chemical physics, and gravitational physics.