1. A method for triggering a circuit breaker in the event of a short circuit in which current flowing in a phase conductor is evaluated by comparing the current with a threshold current, and the circuit breaker is triggered if a result of the evaluation reveals a presence of a short circuit, the method comprising: sampling the current at a fixed sampling frequency and digitizing the sampled currect to determine digital current values; computing, for a fixed number of the digital current values in direct succession, wavelet coefficients for at least two segmentation levels by way of a wavelet transformation; comparing at least two wavelet coefficients qualitatively with each other if a last of the digital current values in direct succession is relatively larger than the threshold current; and triggering the circuit breaker if the wavelet coefficient of a relatively higher segmentation level is relatively larger than the wavelet coefficient of a relatively lower segmentation level.