Spherically confined isotropic harmonic oscillator

Abstract

The generalized pseudospectral Legendre method is used to carry out accurate calculations of eigenvalues of the spherically confined isotropic harmonic oscillator with impenetrable boundaries. The energy of the confined state is found to be equal to that of the unconfined state when the radius of confinement is suitably chosen as the location of the radial nodes in the unconfined state. This incidental degeneracy condition is numerically shown to be valid in general. Further, the full set of pairs of confined states defined by the quantum numbers [(n+1, \ell) ; (n, \ell+2)], n = 1,2,.., and with the radius of confinement {(2 \ell +3)/2}^{1/2} a.u., which represents the single node in the unconfined (1, \ell) state, is found to display a constant energy level separation exactly given by twice the oscillator frequency. The results of similar numerical studies on the confined Davidson oscillator with impenetrable boundary as well as the confined isotropic harmonic oscillator with finite potential barrier are also reported .The significance of the numerical results are discussed.