Vacuum Instability in Electric Fields via AdS/CFT: Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian and Planckian Thermalization

Understand

We analyze vacuum instability of strongly coupled gauge theories in a constant electric field using AdS/CFT correspondence.

• The model is the N=2 1-flavor supersymmetric large N_c QCD in the strong 't Hooft coupling limit.
• We calculate the Euler-Heisenberg effective Lagrangian L(E), which encodes the nonlinear response and the quantum decay rate of the vacuum in a background electric field E, from the complex D-brane action in AdS/CFT.
• We find that the decay rate given by Im L(E) becomes nonzero above a critical electric field set by the confining force between quarks.