Accurate analytic presentation of solution of the Schrödinger equation with arbitrary physical potential: Excited states

Abstract

The quasilinearization method (QLM) is used to approximate analytically, both the ground state and the excited state solutions of the Schrödinger equation for arbitrary potentials. The procedure of approximation was demonstrated on examples of a few often used physical potentials such as the quartic anharmonic oscillator, the Yukawa and the spiked harmonic oscillator potentials. The accurate analytic expressions for the ground and excited state energies and wave functions were presented. These high-precision approximate analytic representations are obtained by first casting the Schrödinger equation into a nonlinear Riccati form and then solving that nonlinear equation analytically in the first QLM iteration. In the QLM the nonlinear differential equation is treated by approximating the nonlinear terms by a sequence of linear expressions. The QLM is iterative but not perturbative and gives stable solutions to nonlinear problems without depending on the existence of a smallness parameter. The method provides final and reasonable results for both small and large values of the coupling constant and is able to handle even super singular potentials for which each term of the perturbation theory is infinite and the perturbation expansion does not exist. The choice of zero iteration is based on general features of solutions near the boundaries. In order to estimate the accuracy of the QLM solutions, the exact numerical solutions were found as well. The first QLM iterate given by analytic expression allows to estimate analytically the role of different parameters and the influence of their variation on different characteristics of the relevant quantum systems. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.