Fermion particle production in semiclassical Boltzmann-Vlasov transport theory

We present numerical solutions of the semiclassical Boltzmann-Vlasov equation for fermion particle-antiparticle production by strong electric fields in boost-invariant coordinates in (1+1) and (3+1) dimensional QED. We compare the Boltzmann-Vlasov results with those of recent quantum field theory calculations and find good agreement. We conclude that extending the Boltzmann-Vlasov approach to the case of QCD should allow us to do a thorough investigation of how backreaction affects recent results on the dependence of the transverse momentum distribution of quarks and antiquarks on a second Casimir invariant of color SU(3).