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arXiv · 2603.25491

QED cross sections in strong magnetic fields

Olavi Kiuru·Joonas Nättilä·Risto Paatelainen·Aleksi Vuorinen
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Abstract

The magnetospheres of magnetars, a class of highly magnetized neutron stars, host magnetic fields exceeding the Schwinger limit, where Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) becomes nonlinear. In such environments, QED scattering processes are strongly modified, which may affect plasma dynamics. In this work, we apply a formalism originally developed for the study of magnetic-field effects in hot quark-gluon plasma to strong-field QED. The method resums interactions between virtual electrons and the external magnetic field, consistently incorporating the finite decay widths of excited Landau levels derived from the fermion self-energy. Using this framework, we perform the first systematic analysis of tree-level QED scattering processes in strong magnetic fields, concentrating on the processes of highest relevance for the plasma dynamics of magnetars. All resulting cross sections are provided in an open-source Python package.

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Olavi Kiuru, Joonas Nättilä, Risto Paatelainen, Aleksi Vuorinen. 2026-03-26. QED cross sections in strong magnetic fields. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25491

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