Threshold Phenomena in Intense Electromagnetic Fields

The influence of intense electromagnetic fields on the formation and decay of quasistationary states of different quantum systems is investigated based on exact solutions of quantum equations for charged particle motion. The method allows examining systems where a spontaneous decay may occur as well as phenomena that occur only under the action of the field. Different values of the total magnetic moment of the system are taken into account in this consideration. A consistent use of the analytic continuation method allows obtaining nonlinear equations that determine complex energies in an external field. The asymptotic expansions for real and imaginary energy values under the action of weak and strong electromagnetic fields are investigated. The developed approach allows establishing the characteristic values for the length parameters that determine the formation of the processes in superstrong fields. We note that a significant decrease of distances in strong fields may lead to effects with a new characteristic length scale, characterizing a modified quantum electrodynamics (QED) formalism, namely, the “QED with the fundamental mass formalism”.