Quantum Mechanics for Engineers |
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© Leon van Dommelen |
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D.12 The harmonic oscillator solution
If you really want to know how the harmonic oscillator wave function
can be found, here it is. Read at your own risk.
The ODE (ordinary differential equation) to solve is
where the spring constant was rewritten as the equivalent
expression .
Now the first thing you always want to do with this sort of problems
is to simplify it as much as possible. In particular, get rid of as
much dimensional constants as you can by rescaling the variables:
define a new scaled -coordinate and a scaled energy
by
If you make these replacements into the ODE above, you can make the
coefficients of the two terms in the left hand side equal by choosing
. In that case both terms
will have the same net coefficient . Then
if you cleverly choose , the
right hand side will have that coefficient too, and you can divide it
away and end up with no coefficients at all:
Looks a lot cleaner, not?
Now examine this equation for large values of (i.e. large ).
You get approximately
If you write the solution as an exponential, you can ballpark that it
must take the form
where the dots indicate terms that are small compared to
for large . The form of the solution is
important, since becomes infinitely large at large
. That is unacceptable: the probability of finding the
particle cannot become infinitely large at large : the total
probability of finding the particle must be one, not infinite. The
only solutions that are acceptable are those that behave as
for large .
Now split off the leading exponential part by defining a new unknown
by
Substituting this in the ODE and dividing out the exponential, you
get:
Now try to solve this by writing as a power series, (say, a Taylor
series):
where the values of run over whatever the appropriate powers are
and the are constants. If you plug this into the ODE, you get
For the two sides to be equal, they must have the same coefficient for
every power of .
There must be a lowest value of for which there is a nonzero
coefficient , for if took on arbitrarily large negative
values, would blow up strongly at the origin, and the probability
to find the particle near the origin would then be infinite. Denote
the lowest value of by . This lowest power produces a
power of in the left hand side of the equation above, but
there is no corresponding power in the right hand side. So, the
coefficient of will need to be zero, and that
means either 0 or 1. So the power series for
will need to start as either or .
The constant or is allowed to have any nonzero value.
But note that the term normally produces a term
in the right hand side of the equation
above. For the left hand side to have a matching term, there
will need to be a further term in the power series
for ,
where will need to equal
, so
. This term in turn will
normally produce a term
in the right hand side which will have to be canceled in the left
hand side by a term in the power series for
. And so on.
So, if the power series starts with 0, the solution will take the
general form
while if it starts with 1 you will get
In the first case, you have a symmetric solution, one which remains
the same when you flip over the sign of , and in the second
case you have an antisymmetric solution, one which changes sign when
you flip over the sign of .
You can find a general formula for the coefficients of the series by
making the change in notations in the left-hand-side sum:
Note that you can start summing at rather than
, since the first term in the sum is zero anyway. Next
note that you can again forget about the difference between
and , because it is just a symbolic summation variable. The
symbolic sum writes out to the exact same actual sum whether you call
the symbolic summation variable or .
So for the powers in the two sides to be equal, you must have
In particular, for large , by approximation
Now if you check out the Taylor series of , (i.e.
the Taylor series of with replaced by ,) you
find it satisfies the exact same equation. So, normally the solution
blows up something like at large . And
since was , normally takes
on the unacceptable form . (If you
must have rigor here, estimate in terms of
where is a number slightly less than one, plus a polynomial.
That is enough to show unacceptability of such solutions.)
What are the options for acceptable solutions? The only possibility
is that the power series terminates. There must be a highest power
, call it , whose term in the right hand
side is zero
In that case, there is no need for a further term,
the power series will remain a polynomial of degree . But
note that all this requires the scaled energy to equal
, and the actual energy is therefore
2. Different choices for the power at which the
series terminates produce different energies and corresponding
eigenfunctions. But they are discrete, since , as any power
, must be a nonnegative integer.
With identified as , you can find the ODE for
listed in table books, like [41, 29.1], under the
name Hermite's differential equation.
They then
identify the polynomial solutions as the so-called “Hermite
polynomials,” except for a normalization factor. To find the
normalization factor, i.e. or , demand that the total
probability of finding the particle anywhere is one,
1. You should be able
to find the value for the appropriate integral in your table book,
like [41, 29.15].
Putting it all together, the generic expression for the eigenfunctions
can be found to be:
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(D.4) |
where the details of the Hermite polynomials
can
be found in table books like [41, pp. 167-168]. They
are readily evaluated on a computer using the “recurrence
relation” you can find there, for as far as computer round-off
error allows (up to about 70.)
Quantum field theory allows a much neater way to find the
eigenfunctions. It is explained in addendum {A.15.5} or
equivalently in {D.64}.