Abstract
This chapter treats the influence of strong gravitational fields on the vacuum. After a brief introduction to the Dirac equation in generally covariant form, it is shown that the gap between particle and antiparticle states is narrowed in the gravitational field of a collapsed star, such as a neutron star. When the star collapses to a black hole, the gap shrinks to zero at the Schwarzschild radius r s = 2GM/c 2,and the vacuum becomes unstable.
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References
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© 1985 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Greiner, W., Müller, B., Rafelski, J. (1985). Strong Fields in General Relativity. In: Quantum Electrodynamics of Strong Fields. Texts and Monographs in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82272-8_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82272-8_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-82274-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-82272-8
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