Trident pair production in plane waves: Coherence, exchange, and spacetime inhomogeneity

Abstract

We study the trident process in inhomogeneous plane wave background fields. We obtain compact analytical expressions for all terms in the probability, including the exchange part, for an arbitrarily shaped plane wave. We evaluate the probability numerically using complex deformation of lightfront time integrals and derive various analytical approximations. Our results provide insights into the importance of the one-step and exchange parts of the probability relative to the two-step process, and into the convergence to the locally constant field approximation.