Vacuum pair production in zeptosecond pulses: Peculiar momentum spectra and striking particle acceleration by bipolar pulses

Abstract: We examine the phenomenon of electron-positron pair production from vacuum in a combination of two counterpropagating electromagnetic pulses having a duration of the order of the Compton time. We show that in this extreme short-time domain, the momentum distributions of the particles produced possess a peculiar structure which strongly depends on whether the electromagnetic pulses have a unipolar or bipolar profile. It is shown that bipolar pulses can predominantly generate particles with ultrarelativistic velocities along the propagation direction of the pulses, while unipolar ones are generally more favorable in terms of the total particle yield in the same regime. The highly nontrivial properties of the $e^+e^-$ spectra revealed in our study provide strong experimental signatures paving the way to probe a complex vacuum response within the short-time domain of quantum electrodynamics.