A perturbative treatment for the bound states of the Hellmann potential

Abstract

A new approximation formalism is applied to study the bound states of the Hellmann potential, which represents the superposition of the attractive Coulomb potential $-a/r$ and the Yukawa potential $b\exp (-\delta r)/r$ of arbitrary strength $b$ and screening parameter $\delta $. Although the analytic expressions for the energy eigenvalues $E_{n,l\text{}}$ yield quite accurate results for a wide range of $n,\ell $ in the limit of very weak screening, the results become gradually worse as the strength $b$ and the screening coefficient $\delta $ increase. This is because that the expansion parameter is not sufficiently small enough to guarantee the convergence of the expansion series for the energy levels.