Fast Vacuum Decay into Quark Pairs in Strong Color Electric and Magnetic Fields

Abstract

We study quark-pair creations in strong color electromagnetic fields. We point out that, for massless quarks, the vacuum persistency probability per unit space-time volume is zero, i.e., the quark-pair creation rate w is infinite, in general homogeneous color electromagnetic fields, while it is finite when the color magnetic field is absent. We find that the contribution from the lowest Landau level (LLL) dominates this phenomenon. With an effective theory of the LLL projection, we also discuss dynamics of the vacuum decay, taking into account the back reaction of pair creations.