Speaker
Description
The creation and annihilation of particles is a fundamental feature of relativistic quantum fields. A famous example of this is provided by Schwinger’s 1951 prediction that the vacuum is unstable to particle-antiparticle production if a static electric field is applied to it. In this talk we examine the classical field limit of Schwinger pair production by mapping the Klein-Gordon equation with an electric field onto the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation with a 1/r^2 potential. This latter problem has two regimes depending on the depth of the potential: a sub-critical regime where PT symmetry is preserved and a supercritical regime where PT symmetry is broken and one finds ``fall-to-the-centre’’ where probability is absorbed at the origin. Schwinger pair production occurs in the latter regime and can be described in terms of non-Hermitian quantum mechanics.
