Time-dependent pair creation and the Schwinger mechanism in graphene

François Fillion-Gourdeau and Steve MacLean
Phys. Rev. B 92, 035401 – Published 1 July 2015

Abstract

The momentum spectrum of positively and negatively charged carriers created in intrinsic graphene submitted to a time-dependent external electric field is evaluated for many external field configurations. Owing to the formal analogy between relativistic quantum mechanics and the description of graphene quasiparticles in terms of the massless Dirac equation, the electron momentum density is evaluated within two-dimensional massless quantum electrodynamics coupled to a strong classical field. This allows the treatment of dynamical effects in electron-hole creation and gives a physical description in terms of the time-dependent Schwinger mechanism. At zero transverse momentum, it is shown that the Fermi bound in the electron-hole momentum spectrum is saturated in a certain momentum window and the pair density depends only on the potential difference between asymptotic potentials before and after the interaction. The pair density for nonzero transverse momenta is evaluated using numerical calculations. The numerical results demonstrate that an important number of pairs can be created by an external field through both tunneling and multiphoton processes. It is argued that these features of the dynamical pair production may facilitate the detection of the Schwinger mechanism using graphene as a condensed matter analog to quantum electrodynamics.

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  • Received 26 March 2015
  • Revised 12 May 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.92.035401

©2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

François Fillion-Gourdeau1,* and Steve MacLean1,2,†

  • 1Université du Québec, INRS-Énergie, Matériaux et Télécommunications, Varennes, Québec, Canada J3X 1S2
  • 2Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1

  • *francois.fillion@emt.inrs.ca
  • steve.maclean@emt.inrs.ca

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Vol. 92, Iss. 3 — 15 July 2015

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