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A holographic description of the Schwinger effect in a confining gauge theory

This is a review of the recent progress on a holographic description of the Schwinger effect. In 2011, Semenoff and Zarembo proposed a scenario to study the Schwinger effect in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The production rate of quark anti-quark pairs was computed in the Coulomb phase. In particular, it provided the critical value of external electric field, above which particles are freely created and the vacuum decays catastrophically. Then the potential analysis in the holographic approach was invented and it enabled us to study the Schwinger effect in the confining phase as well. A remarkable feature of the Schwinger effect in the confining phase is to exhibit another kind of the critical value, below which the pair production cannot occur and the vacuum of the system is non-perturbatively stable. The critical value is tantamount to the confining string tension. We computed the pair production rate numerically and introduced new exponents associated with the critical electric fields.