Resonant production of fermions in an axial background

We consider the resonant production of fermions from an oscillating axial background. The classical evolution of the axial field is given by that of a massive pseudovector field, as suggested by the renormalizability of the theory. We look upon both the massive and the massless fermion production from a perturbative point of view. We obtain the corresponding spectrum and angular distributions for the different spins or helicities in the particular case of a spatial-like axial field. We also extend our study to the nonperturbative regime in the massless case and compare the results with the perturbative ones. @S0556-2821~99!04308-8#