Wick's theorem
Teorema de Wick
- Date
- 1950 · confidence low
- Place
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
- Credited to
- Gian Carlo Wick
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Combinatorial method for reducing products of creation and annihilation operators in quantum field theory to sums of pairwise products (contractions), enabling the systematic use of Feynman diagrams; formulated by Gian Carlo Wick.
What it led to
- Practical computation of Feynman diagrams
- Development of perturbative quantum field theory
- Isserlis' theorem, its probabilistic analogue
- Simplification of calculations in particle physics