A strange weak value in spontaneous pair productions via a supercritical step potential

Abstract

We consider a case where a weak value is introduced as a physical quantity rather than an average of weak measurements. The case we treat is a time evolution of a particle by 1+1 dimensional Dirac equation. Particularly in a spontaneous pair production via a supercritical step potential, a quantitative explanation can be given by a weak value for the group velocity of the particle. We also show the condition for the pair production (supercriticality) corresponds to the condition when the weak value takes a strange value (superluminal velocity).Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, close to published versio