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Physical Review Letters

Exact Path-Integral Solution of the Dirac-Coulomb Problem

M. A. Kayed, Akira Inomata

Published Jul 9, 1984• 27 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An exact path-integral solution of the Dirac equation with a Coulomb potential is found. The energy-dependent Green's function of the second-order Dirac-Coulomb equation, expressed as a polar-coordinate path integral, is reduced to the exactly solvable path integral for an isotropic harmonic oscillator by a coordinate transformation combined with a local time rescaling. The Green's function of the linear Dirac equation is evaluated with the help of the Biedenharn transformation. The energy spectrum for the bound states is also obtained.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.53.107

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An exact path-integral solution of the Dirac equation with a Coulomb potential is found. The energy-dependent Green's function of the second-order Dirac-Coulomb equation, expressed as a polar-coordinate path integral, is reduced to the exactly solvable path integral for an isotropic harmonic oscillator by a coordinate transformation combined with a local time rescaling. The Green's function of the linear Dirac equation is evaluated with the help of the Biedenharn transformation. The energy spectrum for the bound states is also obtained.
Exact Green’s function related to a Dirac particle submitted to the combination of Aharonov–Bohm and Coulomb potentials in [Formula: see text]) coordinate space is analytically calculated via path integral formalism. The Pauli matrices which describe the spin dynamics are replaced by two fermionic oscillators via the Schwinger model. The energy spectrum as well as the corresponding normalized wave functions are extracted following this approach. The interesting properties of the spinors are thus deduced after symmetrization. According to the symmetric form for Green’s function, it is shown that the non-relativistic limit of the Dirac particle is undertaken with much ease.
The problem of a Dirac particle moving in a deformed Hulthén potential is solved in the framework of the path integral formalism. With the help of the Biedenharn transformation, the construction of a closed form for the Green’s function of the second-order Dirac equation is done by using a proper approximation to the centrifugal term and the Green’s function of the linear Dirac equation is calculated. The energy spectrum for the bound states is obtained from the poles of the Green’s function. A Dirac particle in the standard Hulthén potential ( q = 1) and a Dirac hydrogen-like ion ( q = 1 and a → ∞) are considered as particular cases.
With the use of a simple similarity transformation which brings the radial wave equations of the Dirac-Coulomb problem into a form nearly identical to those of the Schr\"odinger and Klein-Gordon equations, we derive simplified solutions to the Dirac-Coulomb equation for both the bound and continuum states following the familiar standard procedure adopted in the derivation of the conventional solutions. We show that to obtain the desired form of the second-order radial equations we can still work with a first-order partial differential equation rather than with the second-order Dirac equation widely employed in the derivation of the simplified solutions, and thus we can avoid the task of reducing the solutions of the second-order equations to those of the original Dirac equation. The transformed Dirac-Coulomb radial equations are so simple that one can apply the WKB method to them in the same way that one applies the WKB approximation to the Schr\"odinger radial equation, without making the further approximations commonly invoked, and the Sommerfeld-Dirac discrete spectrum follows immediately. For small Z\ensuremath{\alpha}, we also present approximate expressions for both the transformed and the original Dirac-Coulomb wave functions, which are valid for all energies and certainly valid in the quasirelativistic approximation which takes account of relativistic effects. The structure of these approximate expressions also suggests one of the methods to obtain relativistic approximate wave functions from the Pauli-spinor wave function for more general central potentials arising in atoms, molecules, and solids.
We study the problem of the relativistic motion of a 1/2-spin particle in an exactly solvable potential, which consists of the harmonic oscillator potential plus a novel angle-dependent potential, The analytic bound state solutions of the Dirac equation for this potential are obtained by using the Nikiforov–Uvarov method. The wave functions of the radial and angle-dependent parts of the Dirac equation are derived in the form of the Laguerre and Jacobi polynomials. The contribution of the angle-dependent potential to the relativistic energy spectra is discussed under the condition that the scalar potential is equal to or minus the vector potential.