Schwinger mechanism enhanced by the Nielsen-Olesen instability

We discuss gluon production by the Schwinger mechanism in collinear color-electric and magnetic fields which may be realized in pre-equilibrium stages of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Fluctuations of non-Abelian gauge fields around a purely color-magnetic field contain exponentially growing unstable modes in a longitudinally soft momentum region, which is known as the Nielsen-Olesen instability. With a color-electric field imposed parallelly to the color-magnetic field, we can formulate this instability as the Schwinger mechanism. This is because soft unstable modes are accelerated by the electric fields to escape from the instability condition. Effects of instability remain in the transverse spectrum of particle modes, leading to an anomalously intense Schwinger particle production. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.