Calculations of vacuum mean values of spinor field current and energy–momentum tensor in a constant electric background

Abstract In the framework of strong-field QED with x -steps, we study vacuum mean values of the current density and energy–momentum tensor of the quantized spinor field placed in the so-called L -constant electric background. The latter background can be, for example, understood as the electric field confined between capacitor plates, which are separated by a sufficiently large distance L . First, we reveal peculiarities of nonperturbative calculating of mean values in strong-field QED with x -steps in general and, in the L -constant electric field, in particular. We propose a new renormalization and volume regularization procedures that are adequate for these calculations. We find necessary representations for singular spinor functions in the background under consideration. With their help, we calculate the above mentioned vacuum means. In the obtained expressions, we show how to separate global contributions due to the particle creation and local ones due to the vacuum polarization. We demonstrate how these contributions can be related to the renormalized effective Heisenberg–Euler Lagrangian.