  Particle-antiparticle pairs can be produced by background electric fields via
the Schwinger mechanism provided they are unconfined. If, as in QED in
(3+1)-$d$ these particles are massive, the particle production rate is
exponentially suppressed below a threshold field strength. Above this
threshold, the energy for pair creation must come from the electric field
itself which ought to eventually relax to the threshold strength. Calculating
this relaxation in a self-consistent manner, however, is difficult. Chu and
Vachaspati addressed this problem in the context of capacitor discharge in
massless QED$_2$ [1] by utilizing bosonization in two-dimensions. When the bare
fermions are massless, the dual bosonized theory is free and capacitor
discharge can be analyzed exactly [1], however, special care is required in its
interpretation given that the theory exhibits confinement. In this paper we
reinterpret the findings of [1], where the capacitors Schwinger-discharge via
electrically neutral dipolar meson-production, and generalize this to the case
where the fermions have bare masses. Crucially, we note that when the initial
charge of the capacitor is large compared to the charge of the fermions, $Q \gg
e$, the classical equation of motion for the bosonized model accurately
characterizes the dynamics of discharge. For massless QED$_2$, we find that the
discharge is suppressed below a critical plate separation that is commensurate
with the length scale associated with the meson dipole moment. For massive
QED$_2$, we find in addition, a mass threshold familiar from (3+1)-$d$, and
show the electric field relaxes to a final steady state with a magnitude
proportional to the initial charge. We discuss the wider implications of our
findings and identify challenges in extending this treatment to higher
dimensions.
