Sang Pyo Kim

Ricci flat black holes and Hawking-Page phase transition in Gauss-Bonnet gravity and dilaton gravity

It is well known that there exists a Hawking-Page phase transition between a spherical anti-de Sitter (AdS) black hole and a thermal AdS space. The phase transition does not happen between a Ricci flat AdS black hole whose horizon is a Ricci flat space and a thermal AdS space in the Poincare coordinates. However, the Hawking-Page phase transition occurs between a Ricci flat AdS black hole and an AdS soliton if at least one of the horizon coordinates for the Ricci flat black hole is compact. We show a similar phase transition between the Ricci flat black holes and deformed AdS solitons in the Gauss-Bonnet gravity and the dilaton gravity with a Liouville-type potential including the gauged supergravity coming from the spherical reduction of Dp branes in type II supergravity. In contrast to Einstein gravity, we find that the high temperature phase can be dominated either by black holes or deformed AdS solitons depending on parameters.

Effective action of QED in electric field backgrounds

We use the evolution operator method to find the one-loop effective action of scalar and spinor QED in electric field backgrounds in terms of the Bogoliubov coefficient between the ingoing and the outgoing vacua. We obtain the exact one-loop effective action for a Sauter-type electric field, E 0 sech 2 (t/τ), and show that the imaginary part correctly yields the vacuum persistence. The renormalized effective action shows the general relation between the vacuum persistence and the total mean number of created pairs for the constant and the Sauter-type electric field.

Vacuum persistence and inversion of spin statistics in strong QED

The vacuum persistence can be written as the Bose-Einstein distribution in spinor QED and as the Fermi-Dirac distribution in scalar QED exactly in a constant electric field and approximately in time-dependent electric fields. The inverse temperature is determined by the period of charged particle in the Euclidean time and the negative chemical potential by the ratio of the worldline instanton to the inverse temperature. The negativity of chemical potential is due to the vacuum instability under strong electric fields. The inversion of spin statistics in the vacuum persistence is a consequence of the Bogoliubov relations for fermions and bosons.

Effective action of QED in electric field backgrounds. II. Spatially localized fields

We find the Bogoliubov coefficient from the tunneling boundary condition on charged particles in a static electric field E{sub 0}sech{sup 2}(z/L) and, using the regularization scheme in Phys. Rev. D 78, 105013 (2008), obtain the exact one-loop effective action in scalar and spinor QED. It is shown that the effective action satisfies the general relation between the vacuum persistence and the mean number of produced pairs. We advance an approximation method for general electric fields and show the duality between the space-dependent and time-dependent electric fields of the same form at the leading order of the effective actions.

Schwinger pair production at finite temperature in QED

We use the evolution operator method to find the Schwinger pair-production rate at finite temperature in scalar and spinor QED by counting the vacuum production, the induced production, and the stimulated annihilation from the initial ensemble. It is shown that the pair-production rate for each state is factorized into the mean number at zero temperature and the initial thermal distribution for bosons and fermions.

Schwinger pair production at finite temperature in scalar QED

In scalar QED we study the Schwinger pair production from an initial ensemble of charged bosons when an electric field is turned on for a finite period together with or without a constant magnetic field. The scalar QED Hamiltonian depends on time through the electric field, which causes the initial ensemble of bosons to evolve out of equilibrium. Using the Liouville-von Neumann method for the density operator and quantum states for each momentum mode, we calculate the Schwinger pair-production rate at finite temperature, which is the pair-production rate from the vacuum times a thermal factor of the Bose-Einstein distribution.

PROBING THE VACUUM STRUCTURE OF SPACETIME

We explore the question of how to probe the vacuum structure of space time by a massive scalar field through interaction with background gravitons. Using the Γ-regularization for the in-/out-state formalism, we find the effective action of a scalar field in a conformally, asymptotically flat spacetime and a four-dimensional de Sitter space, which is a gravitational analog of the Heisenberg-Euler and Schwinger effective action for a charged scalar in a constant electric field. The effective action is nonperturbative in that it sums all one-loop diagrams with arbitrary number of external lines of gravitons. The massive scalar field becomes unstable due to particle production, the effective action has an imaginary part that determines the decay rate of the vacuum, and the out-vacuum is unitarily inequivalent to the in-vacuum.

Nonperturbative QED effective action at finite temperature

We propose a novel method for the effective action of spinor and scalar QED at finite temperature in time-dependent electric fields, where charged pairs evolve in a nonadiabatic way. The imaginary part of the effective action consists of thermal loops of the Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein distribution for the initial thermal ensemble, weighted with factors of the Bogoliubov coefficients for quantum effects. And the real part of the effective action is determined by the mean number of produced pairs and vacuum polarization at zero temperature. In the weak-field limit, the mean number of produced pairs is shown twice the imaginary part. We explicitly find the finite-temperature effective action in a constant electric field.

QUANTUM DYNAMICS FOR DE SITTER RADIATION

We revisit the Hamiltonian formalism for a massive scalar field and study the particle production in a de Sitter space. In the invariant-operator picture the time-dependent annihilation and creation operators are constructed in terms of a complex solution to the classical equation of motion for the field and the Gaussian wave function for each Fourier mode is found which is an exact solution to the Schrodinger equation. The in-out formalism is reformulated by the annihilation and creation operators and the Gaussian wave functions. The de Sitter radiation from the in-out formalism differs from the Gibbons-Hawking radiation in the planar coordinates, and we discuss the discrepancy of the particle production by the two methods.

Pair production density in strong QED

The current status of the research on pair production in strong QED is briefly reviewed not only for strong electric fields but also for strong magnetic fields in magnetically dominated astrophysical environment. A particular attention is paid to the spectral production number in the in- and out-state formalism and a possible prescription of the momentum integration is proposed to obtain the production density.