Schwingers

Schwingers can refer to people bearing the surname Schwinger or to concepts in physics named after Julian Schwinger.

In science, the most prominent association is with Julian Schwinger, an American theoretical physicist (1918–1994) who, along with Richard Feynman and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. Schwinger made foundational contributions to the operator formalism of QED and to renormalization methods, and several concepts carry his name.

The Schwinger effect, also called vacuum pair production, describes the spontaneous creation of electron-positron pairs from the quantum vacuum in the presence of a very strong electric field. Predicted by Schwinger in 1951, it has a characteristic electric field strength on the order of 1.3×10^18 V/m and remains a target for high-intensity laser experiments.

The Schwinger model is an exactly solvable theory of quantum electrodynamics in one spatial and one time dimension (1+1D), introduced by Schwinger, which exhibits phenomena such as mass generation and confinement in a simplified setting. Relatedly, the Schwinger-Dyson equations, named for Dyson and Schwinger, are a framework of integral equations for quantum field theory Green functions.

As a surname, Schwinger is of German origin. Notable individuals with the name have contributed to physics and related fields, particularly in theoretical physics and mathematics.