Worldline instantons and the fluctuation prefactor
- Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269-3046 (United States)
In a previous paper [G. V. Dunne and C. Schubert, Phys. Rev. D 72, 105004 (2005).], it was shown that the worldline expression for the nonperturbative imaginary part of the QED effective action can be approximated by the contribution of a special closed classical path in Euclidean spacetime, known as a worldline instanton. Here we extend this formalism to compute also the prefactor arising from quantum fluctuations about this classical closed path. We present a direct numerical approach for determining this prefactor, and we find a simple explicit formula for the prefactor in the cases where the inhomogeneous electric field is a function of just one spacetime coordinate. We find excellent agreement between our semiclassical approximation, conventional WKB, and recent numerical results using numerical worldline loops.
- OSTI ID:
- 20782699
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 73, Issue 6; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.73.065028; (c) 2006 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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