Noncompeting Channel Approach to Pair Creation in Supercritical Fields

The Dirac and Klein-Gordon equations are solved on a space-time grid to study the strong-field induced pair creation process for bosons and fermions from the vacuum. If the external field is sufficiently strong to induce bound states that are embedded in the negative energy continuum, a complex scaling technique of the Hamiltonian can predict the longtime behavior of the dynamics. In the case of multiple bound states this technique predicts the occurrence of a new collective time scale. The longtime behavior of the pair creation is not determined by a single (most important) channel, but collectively by the sum of all individual widths of the embedded states.