Karthik Rajeev

We revisit particle creation in strong fields, and backreaction on those fields, from an amplitudes perspective. We describe the strong field by an initial coherent state of photons which we explicitly evolve in time, thus going beyond the background-field approximation, and then consider observables which quantify the effects of backreaction.

Understanding the emergence of classical behavior from a quantum theory is vital to establishing the quantum origin for the temperature fluctuations observed in the cosmic microwave background. We show that a real-space approach can comprehensively address the quantum-to-classical transition problem in the leading order of curvature perturbations.

Abstract In recent years, significant progress has been made in the computation of conservative and dissipative scattering observables using the post-Minkowskian approach to gravitational dynamics. However, for accurate modeling of unbound orbits, an appropriate effective-one-body (EOB) resummation of the post-Minkowski results that also accounts for dissipative dynamics is desirable. As a step in this direction, we consider the electromagnetic analog of this problem here.