Semiclassical description of soliton-antisoliton pair production in particle collisions

Abstract

We develop a consistent semiclassical method to calculate the probability of topological soliton-antisoliton pair production in collisions of elementary particles. In our method one adds an auxiliary external field pulling the soliton and antisoliton in the opposite directions. This transforms the original scattering process into a Schwinger pair creation of the solitons induced by the particle collision. One describes the Schwinger process semiclassically and recovers the original scattering probability in the limit of vanishing external field. We illustrate the method in (1+1)-dimensional scalar field model where the suppression exponents of soliton-antisoliton production in the multiparticle and two-particle collisions are computed numerically.