Heavy quark production in strong non-Abelian field

In the framework of Wigner function formalism we investigated strange and charm quark-pair production in the early stage of heavy ion collisions. According to our model the particle production is initiated by an external time-dependent color field, that simulates an overlap of two colliding ions and color charge separation. The calculations were performed in an SU(2)-color model with finite current quark masses. We obtained that the production efficiency of heavy quarks is determined by the large inverse effective pulse duration of the field. We demonstrated that for short field pulses (i.e. for ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions) the heavy quark-pair production is strongly deviates from commonly used Schwinger formula estimate, reading exponential suppression of the probability of heavy particle production P ∼ exp(−m2/E).