Schwinger mechanism during inflation

We revisit the efficiency of the Schwinger mechanism in creating charged pairs during inflation. We consider a minimal setup of inflation in which the inflaton field is a complex scalar field charged under a U(1) gauge field. There is a time-dependent conformal coupling which pumps energy from the inflaton field to the gauge field to furnish a nearly constant background electric field energy density to drive the Schwinger mechanism. The coupling between the gauge field and the scalar field induces a time-dependent effective mass for the inflaton field. The requirement of a long period of slow-roll inflation causes the Schwinger mechanism to be highly inefficient during inflation. The nonperturbative Schwinger mechanism can be relevant only toward the end of inflation and only on very small scales. This is in contrast to hypothetical models studied in literature in which the complex scalar field is a test field and a constant electric field is imposed on the dS background by hand. We calculate the number of pairs of charged particles created perturbatively during inflation. We show that it is proportional to the amplitude of the quadrupolar statistical anisotropy and it is very small. Consequently, the backreactions of created particles on magnetogenesis on large scales are negligible.