Stability and decay of the Dirac vacuum in external gauge fields

We consider various gauge fields coupled to the free Dirac equation according to symmetry principles. The gauge fields are treated as classical, unquantized fields. Sufficiently strong time-independent fields may give rise to spontaneous particle creation and to the decay of the symmetric Dirac vacuum into a new ground state with broken symmetry. The vacuum stability of the Dirac field is studied for the cases of external electromagnetic (U(1)), gravitational (Poincaré group including torsion) and Yang-Mills (SU(2)) potentials.