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Abstract:
In this talk, I will discuss a particle-antiparticle pair production mechanism under the category of Schwinger effect. In the presence of a strong, supercritical, potential, particles and antiparticles can be pair produced from the vacuum. This has been studied for gauge fields, such as QED, QCD, and gravitation fields. We point out that the pair production could be sourced by a broader category of potentials, provided vector or chiral vector couplings to fermions.
As an example, we show that neutrino-antineutrino can be pair produced under a strong matter potential. The supercritical condition requires that the matter potential to be greater than the neutrino mass, which can be realized in dense objects such as neutron stars. Additionally, a sizable pair production rate requires the potential to have a large gradient, which is featured in neutron stars with density discontinuity associated with a first order nuclear-quark phase transition. Provided with necessary conditions, the neutrino-antineutrino pairs are produced at a rate approximately 10^38/s. The produced neutrinos and antineutrinos, either get absorbed or escape the neutron stars, will largely change the thermal history and become observable through the cooling curve of neutron stars.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Yikun Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She works in theoretical particle physics, with a focus on beyond the Standard Model physics. Her work spans over multiple directions, including baryogenesis, Higgs physics, dark matter direct-detection, early universe and astrophysics. She received her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2021, and was a Burke postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 2021 to 2024.
Alternative online link: https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/9EbR6QYQovdh
ID: 118204139
Prof. Yifan Chen