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Worldline Instantons II: The Fluctuation Prefactor

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arxiv hep-th/0602176 v2 pith:GPPOAQ6O submitted 2006-02-17 hep-th hep-ph

Worldline Instantons II: The Fluctuation Prefactor

classification hep-th hep-ph
keywords prefactorworldlinenumericalclassicalclosedfindpathspacetime
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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In a previous paper [1], it was shown that the worldline expression for the nonperturbative imaginary part of the QED effective action can be approximated by the contribution of a special closed classical path in Euclidean spacetime, known as a worldline instanton. Here we extend this formalism to compute also the prefactor arising from quantum fluctuations about this classical closed path. We present a direct numerical approach for determining this prefactor, and we find a simple explicit formula for the prefactor in the cases where the inhomogeneous electric field is a function of just one spacetime coordinate. We find excellent agreement between our semiclassical approximation, conventional WKB, and recent numerical results using numerical worldline loops.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Worldline Images for Yang-Mills Theory within Boundaries

    hep-th 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A worldline image method is developed for the Yang-Mills effective action with boundaries, checked via the first three Seeley-DeWitt coefficients and applied to chromoelectric gluon production.

  2. Resurgence of the Effective Action in Inhomogeneous Fields

    hep-th 2022-12 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Inhomogeneous background fields convert Borel poles in the effective action to branch points and introduce new ones, allowing resurgent extrapolation to recover non-perturbative information from perturbative input mor...

  3. Scattered wave functions and worldline instantons for particle production in curved spacetime

    gr-qc 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Extends scattered-wave-function and open-worldline-instanton methods to multidimensional curved spacetimes and demonstrates agreement on 2D metric examples.

  4. Introductory Lectures on Resurgence: CERN Summer School 2024

    hep-th 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    Introductory lectures cover resurgent asymptotics using examples like the Airy function, nonlinear Stokes phenomenon, Heisenberg-Euler action, and resurgent continuation.