  This is a review of the recent progress on a holographic description of the
Schwinger effect. In 2011, Semenoff and Zarembo proposed a scenario to study
the Schwinger effect in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The
production rate of quark anti-quark pairs was computed in the Coulomb phase. In
particular, it provided the critical value of external electric field, above
which particles are freely created and the vacuum decays catastrophically. Then
the potential analysis in the holographic approach was invented and it enabled
us to study the Schwinger effect in the confining phase as well. A remarkable
feature of the Schwinger effect in the confining phase is to exhibit another
kind of the critical value, below which the pair production cannot occur and
the vacuum of the system is non-perturbatively stable. The critical value is
tantamount to the confining string tension. We computed the pair production
rate numerically and introduced new exponents associated with the critical
electric fields.

High Energy Physics - Theory;High Energy Physics - Lattice;High Energy Physics - Phenomenology