Pair creation in electric fields

Abstract

Sauter-Schwinger pair creation in electromagnetic fields is a fundamental prediction of QED and one of the motivations for the present efforts in constructing super-strong lasers. I will give a historical review of the subject, and then focus on two recent developments. The first one is the worldline instanton formalism, a sophisticated version of the WKB approximation that makes it possible to calculate the pair creation rate for complicated field configurations. The second one is an adaptation of the Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism suitable for a detailed study of the formation of real particles in time and space.