Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 229, 3469–3485 (2020)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2020-000056-1

Review

Kinetic description of vacuum e⁺e⁻ production in strong electric fields of arbitrary polarization

¹ Department of Physics, St. Petersburg State University, 199034 Saint Petersburg, Russia
² Ioffe Institute, 194021 Saint Petersburg, Russia
³ Department of Physics, Saratov State University, 410026 Saratov, Russia
⁴ Laboratory of Quantum Theory of Intense Fields, Tomsk State University, 634050 Tomsk, Russia

^a e-mail: i.aleksandrov@spbu.ru

Received: 5 April 2020
Accepted: 27 October 2020
Published online: 21 December 2020

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the self-consistent system of kinetic equations (KEs) describing electron-positron pair production from vacuum under the action of a spatially homogeneous time-dependent electric field of arbitrary polarization. The physical significance of all the basic functions of the kinetic theory is ascertained. It is demonstrated that the total system of the KEs consists of two coupled quasiparticle and spin subsystems with their integrals of motion. A projection method is proposed in order to obtain the KE system in two particular cases: linearly polarized external electric field and (2+1)-dimensional description of quasiparticles in graphene. We also address the energy conservation law taking into account the internal plasma field and describe an alternative rigorous derivation of the KE system.