Vacuum Instability and Pair Production in Strong QED

Strong external electromagnetic fields make the QED vacuum unstable which decays by emitting significantly boson or fermion particle-antiparticle pairs. The recent progress in studying the particle-antiparticle pair production phenomenon is reported: 1. New exact formulas for production rates of boson and fermion pairs by a smooth potential step ϕ(x) ∝ tanhkz in three dimensions. 2. Exact expressions for reflection and transmission coefficients, as well as for average numbers of produced pairs and for pair production intensities obtained via the studying scattering versus tunneling process by this potential. 3. On this basis, re-examining and justify the normal spin-statistics relation, a highly nontrivial task due to the vacuum instability.

QED, particle-antiparticle pair production, vacuum instability, spin-statistics relation