Stochastic Schwinger Effect: de Sitter and beyond

Abstract: We develop a stochastic formulation of the Schwinger effect in de Sitter spacetime using the Schwinger--Keldysh (in-in) formalism, tailored to particle production by non-stationary gauge backgrounds in the early Universe. Treating the gauge field as a prescribed classical stochastic ensemble, we integrate out massless charged matter and derive the corresponding influence functional and particle-production kernel to leading non-trivial order in the gauge coupling. Conformal invariance allows the result to be extended directly from de Sitter to generic spatially flat FLRW spacetimes, without relying on asymptotic out states. We establish the infrared safety and classicality conditions of the stochastic description and clarify its relation to the conventional static Schwinger effect. We further extend the framework to massless conformally coupled scalars and to weakly coupled non-Abelian gauge sectors, including Standard Model and hidden-sector examples, in regimes where thermal corrections are negligible. Our results provide a general framework for matter creation by stochastic gauge fields in inflation, preheating, and non-thermal BSM sectors, connecting quantum field theory in curved spacetime with early-Universe and high-energy phenomenology.