Schwinger pair production and the extended uncertainty principle: can heuristic derivations be trusted?

The rate of Schwinger pair production due to an external electric field can be derived heuristically from the uncertainty principle. In the presence of a cosmological constant, it has been argued in the literature that the uncertainty principle receives a correction due to the background curvature,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields Particles and fields, 2020-08, Vol.80 (8), p.1-8, Article 777
Main Author: Ong, Yen Chin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
Astrophysics and Cosmology
Cosmological constant
Electric fields
Elementary Particles
Hadrons
Heavy Ions
Measurement Science and Instrumentation
Nuclear Energy
Nuclear Physics
Pair production
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Field Theories
Quantum Field Theory
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Spacetime
String Theory
Uncertainty principles
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Summary:The rate of Schwinger pair production due to an external electric field can be derived heuristically from the uncertainty principle. In the presence of a cosmological constant, it has been argued in the literature that the uncertainty principle receives a correction due to the background curvature, which is known as the “extended uncertainty principle” (EUP). We show that EUP does indeed lead to the correct result for Schwinger pair production rate in anti-de Sitter spacetime (the case for de Sitter spacetime is similar), provided that the EUP correction term is negative (positive for the de Sitter case). We compare the results with previous works in the EUP literature, which are not all consistent. Our result further highlights an important issue in the literature of generalizations of the uncertainty principle: how much can heuristic derivations be trusted?
ISSN:1434-6044
1434-6052
DOI:10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-8363-2