Convergence of transition amplitudes obtained with the Schwinger variational principle

Abstract

An exactly solvable time-dependent quantum mechanical problem is employed to study the convergence properties of transition amplitudes calculated by using the Schwinger variational principle. A detailed comparison between the amplitudes approximated by the perturbative series and by their associated Schwinger variational principles is performed. The much better performance obtained by the variational principle is documented through different case studies. For a given order of the Schwinger principle, it is observed that the transition amplitudes do not converge to the exact one for large perturbations. The latter is true even though large combinations of unperturbed states with constant coefficients are taken as trial wave functions. As a matter of fact, it is shown that the improvement of the method comes from using better trial wave functions and increasing the order of the Schwinger principle employed.