Heisenberg picture Heisenberg picture In physics, the Heisenberg picture (also called the Heisenberg representation) is a formulation (largely due to Werner Heisenberg in 1925) of quantum mechanics in which the operators (observables and others) incorporate a dependency on time, but the state vectors are time-independent, an arbitrary fixed basis rigidly underlying the theory. It stands in contrast to the Schrödinger picture in which the operators are constant, instead, and the states evolve in time. The two pictures only differ by a basis change with respect to time-dependency, which corresponds to the difference between active and passive transformations. The Heisenberg picture is the
Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangian Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangian In physics, the Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangian describes the non-linear dynamics of electromagnetic fields in vacuum. It was first obtained by Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler in 1936. By treating the vacuum as a medium, it predicts rates of quantum electrodynamics (QED) light interaction processes. It takes into account vacuum polarization to one loop, and is valid for electromagnetic fields that change slowly compared to the inverse electron mass: Here m is the electron mass, e the electron charge, formula_2, and formula_3. In the weak field limit, this becomes: formula_4 It describes photon-photon scattering in QED; Robert Karplus and