Collective plasma effects and strong field QED

The fast development of laser facilities in the past few decades has opened the door for testing several strong field QED effects in recent and future facilities. This has increased the theoretical interest in studying strong QED effects in both plasma and vacuum. In this work, we study the effects of quantum relativistic mechanisms such as Schwinger pair-creation together with classical collective plasma effects. We use a fully quantum kinetic model [1-4] to study the interplay between classical plasma physics and quantum mechanics for ultra-strong fields. In addition, we use a classical but relativistic kinetic equation to show how the predictions from classical theory differ from those from fully quantum theory. The conclusions from this work can be used to identify when semi-classical theories start to be inappropriate to describe the dynamics of plasma in ultrastrong electromagnetic fields.