Optical analogs of pair production and annihilation in binary waveguide arrays with a linearly shifted straight section

We systematically investigate the optical analogs of the e−e+ pair production and annihilation phenomena which can take place simultaneously in a binary waveguide array having a linearly shifted straight section sandwiched between two straight sections. These two processes can be realized by the beam splitting in the linearly shifted straight section which performs the function of an external vector potential with a rectangular form in time in quantum electrodynamics (QED) which is different from two widely used concepts based on an external time-varying electromagnetic field, or an external ultrastrong time-independent potential barrier in space as in the Schwinger mechanism. We show that the numerical results for annihilation and pair production probabilities based on the simulations of beam propagation in binary waveguide arrays in the low-power regime are in very good agreement with the theoretical results. We also reveal that with certain requirements, the proposed discrete model quantitatively mimics the two processes as well as the continuous model of the genuine Dirac equation in free space in QED. We also show that the nonlinearity in the high-power regime can reduce these two effects. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.