Near-Dirichlet quantum dynamics for a $p^3$-corrected particle on an interval

Abstract

We study a nonrelativistic quantum mechanical particle on an interval of finite length with a Hamiltonian that has a $p^3$ correction term, modelling potential low energy quantum gravity effects. We describe explicitly the $U(3)$ family of the self-adjoint extensions of the Hamiltonian and discuss several subfamilies of interest. As the main result, we find a family of self-adjoint Hamiltonians, indexed by four continuous parameters and one binary parameter, whose spectrum and eigenfunctions are perturbatively close to those of the uncorrected particle with Dirichlet boundary conditions, even though the Dirichlet condition as such is not in the $U(3)$ family. Our boundary conditions do not single out distinguished discrete values for the length of the interval in terms of the underlying quantum gravity scale.