Schwinger-Type Pair Production in Non-SUSY AdS/CFT

We study pair production of particles in the presence of an external electric field in a large N non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory using the holographic duality. The dual geometry we consider is asymptotically AdS and is effectively parametrized by two parameters, u(0) and -v5/2 < d = 0, both of which can be related to the effective mass of quark/antiquark for non-supersymmetric theories. We numerically calculate the interquark potential profile and the effective potential to study pair production and analytically find out the threshold electric field beyond which one gets catastrophic pair creation by studying rectangular Wilson loops using the holographic method. We also find out the critical electric field from DBI analysis of a probe brane. Our initial investigations reveal that the critical electric field necessary for spontaneous pair production increases or decreases w.r.t. its non-supersymmetric value depending on the parameter d. Ultimately, we find out the pair production rate of particles in the presence of an external electric field by evaluating circular Wilson loops using perturbative methods. From the later investigation, we note the resemblance with our earlier prediction. However, we also see that for and below another certain value of the parameter d, the pair production rate of particle/antiparticle pairs blows up as the external electric field is taken to zero. We thus infer that the vacuum of the non-SUSY gauge theory is unstable for a range of non-supersymmetric parameter d and that the geometry/non-SUSY field theory under consideration has quite different characteristics than earlier reported.