Helicity signatures in Schwinger pair production under rotating electric fields

Abstract

We investigate helicity effects in electron-positron pair production in circularly polarized electric fields with frequency chirping using the quantum-kinetic formalism for fermions. In particular, we calculate helicity-resolved momentum distributions and characterize the helicity imbalance through the helicity-asymmetry parameter for various electric-field configurations, including temporally asymmetric fields and dynamically assisted two-color fields with different frequency-chirping configurations. We find that right- and left-helicity electrons preferentially populate opposite momentum half-spaces along the out-of-plane momentum direction, leading to a pronounced helicity asymmetry in the produced electron distributions. For temporally asymmetric fields, frequency chirping substantially modifies the momentum distributions and can strongly enhance the helicity asymmetry, with the response depending sensitively on the pulse asymmetry parameter. For symmetric and elongated pulses, the helicity asymmetry approaches 100% at sufficiently large chirp strengths, whereas the compressed-pulse case exhibits a qualitatively different response with suppressed asymmetry at large chirp. For dynamically assisted fields, chirping the weak high-frequency component produces the strongest helicity response, reaching a maximum asymmetry of nearly 87% in the combined field, while chirping the strong field alone results in only a moderate asymmetry of about 12%-14%. Simultaneous chirping produces a large helicity imbalance together with substantial restructuring of the momentum spectrum, although its helicity response is weaker than that obtained by chirping the weak field alone. These results demonstrate that helicity-resolved momentum distributions provide additional information on the spin-dependent dynamics of Schwinger pair production beyond that contained in helicity-summed spectra.