Particle Creation in a Cosmological Background in Analogy to the Schwinger Effect

Abstract We consider a gravitational analogue of the Schwinger effect in a cosmological context. While the Schwinger effect is usually attributed to a static electric background, its derivation is actually based on a switching on/off of the electric field in the infinite past/future. Motivated by this, and our previous work on particle production in a gravitational background, we consider a long pulse of the gravitational field in an FLRW-spacetime, thus simulating a static background. We rigorously derive particle production by a novel application of the Heun equation. In fact, the recently obtained connecting formulas between its local solutions can be used to determine the Bogolyubov coefficients, and subsequently the particle production probabilities, in the limit of an infinitely long pulse. The particle production in the FLRW-model is found to have a lower threshold on the late time frequencies, which can be related to the duration of the time interval of the switching on/off the background field. For large frequencies and in the spatially flat case, we find a Planckian frequency spectrum whose temperature is inversely proportional to the duration of scale change. We compare our findings to Schwinger’s result on particle production for a long pulse of an electromagnetic background field, for which we also include a detailed derivation.