  Abundant phenomenology suggests that strong decays from relatively
low-excitation hadrons into other hadrons proceed by the creation of a light
quark-antiquark pair with zero total angular momentum, the so called $^3P_0$
mechanism originating from a scalar bilinear. Yet the Quantum Chromodynamics
(QCD) interaction is perturbatively mediated by gluons of spin one, and QCD
presents a chirally symmetric Lagrangian. Such scalar decay term must be
spontaneously generated upon breaking chiral symmetry. We attempt to reproduce
this with the help of the quark-gluon vertex in Landau gauge, whose
nonperturbative structure has been reasonably elucidated in the last years, and
insertions of a uniform, constant chromoelectric field. This is akin to
Schwinger pair production in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), and we provide a
comparison with its two field-insertions diagram. We find that, the symmetry
being cylindrical, the adequate quantum numbers to discuss the production are
rather $^3\Sigma_0$, $^3\Sigma_1$ and $^3\Pi_0$ as in diatomic molecules, and
we indeed find a sizeable contribution of the third decay mechanism, which may
give a rationale for the $^3P_0$ phenomenology, as long as the momentum of the
produced pair is at or below the scale of the bare or dynamically generated
fermion mass. On the other hand, ultrarelativistic fermions are rather ejected
with $^3\Sigma_1$ quantum numbers. In QED, our results suggest that
$^3\Sigma_0$ dominates, whereas the constraint of producing a color singlet in
QCD leads to $^3\Pi_0$ dominance at sub-GeV momenta.
