Holographic description of the Schwinger effect in electric and magnetic fields

Abstract

We consider a generalization of the holographic Schwinger effect proposed by Semenoff and Zarembo to the case with constant electric and magnetic fields. There are two ways to turn on magnetic fields, i) the probe D3-brane picture and ii) the string world-sheet picture. In the former picture, magnetic fields both perpendicular and parallel to the electric field are activated by a Lorentz transformation and a spatial rotation. In the latter one, the classical solutions of the string world-sheet corresponding to circular Wilson loops are generalized to contain two additional parameters encoding the presence of magnetic fields.