Vacuum Decay Time in Strong External Fields

Abstract

We consider dynamics of vacuum decay and particle production in the context of short pulse laser experiments. We identify and evaluate the invariant "materialization time," $\tau$, the timescale for the conversion of an electromagnetic field energy into particles, and we compare to the laser related time scales.

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures; improved representation of eq. 12, improved figures, added references, improved introductory material, and corrected typos