The Schwinger Effect for non-Abelian Gauge Bosons

The Schwinger effect is the non-perturbative production of particles from vacuum. This effect is traditionally calculated for electron/positron pairs, but the electric field required to see this effect is astronomically huge. This work is a study of the Schwinger effect for the gauge bosons in an unbroken non-Abelian gauge theory (e.g. the gluons of QCD). Both constant "color electric" fields and "color magnetic" fields are considered as backgrounds. As in the Abelian Schwinger effect, it is found that there is production of ``gluons" for the color electric field, but no particle production for the color magnetic field case. The exponential suppression of particle production due to the mass of the electron/positron in the Abelian Schwinger effect is not present due to the massless nature of the non-Abelian gauge bosons. Thus, the Schwinger effect for gluons should be physically more important as compared to the standard Schwinger effect for electrons/positrons. However, due to confinement the QCD length scale is significantly smaller than the corresponding QED length scale set by the mass of the electron, causing the magnitude of the critical QCD fields to actually be higher than the critical electromagnetic fields.