Notes on holographic Schwinger effect

We use the method of evaluating the decay rate in terms of the imaginary part of a probe brane action to study the holographic Schwinger effect. In the confining D3-branes case, we find that the Schwinger effect occurs at energy scales higher than the Kaluza-Klein mass, indicating the absence of such effect when the dual gauge field theory can be regarded as an 2+1 dimensional theory. This property is independent of the configuration of the probe brane. In the case of D3-branes with a B field dual to a noncommutative super Yang-Mills theory, we study how the decay rate is affected by the noncommutative effect.