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American Journal of Physics

On Boundary Conditions for an Infinite Square-Well Potential in Quantum Mechanics

Ryoichi Seki

Published Aug 1, 1971• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A well-known problem of an infinite square-well potential in quantum mechanics furnishes an interesting boundary condition. We investigate this in detail by considering the infinite square-well potential as a limiting case of an finite square-well potential.
DOI
10.1119/1.1986327

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It is well known that quantum mechanics allows the penetration into classically forbidden regions (tunneling). Less well known seems to be the fact that in some sense the converse is true also. Potentials with classically allowed regions where a particle can move freely to infinity can nevertheless lead to bound states in quantum mechanics due to the stringent requirements of the boundary conditions, thus forbidding an escape to infinity. This effect is demonstrated by using an obvious generalization of the well-known one-dimensional (D=1) square well potential to arbitrary space dimensions.
For a quantum confinement model, the wave function of a particle is zero outside the confined region. Due to this, the negative energy states are, in fact, square integrable. As negative energy states are not physical, we need to impose some boundary conditions in order to avoid these states. For the case of the infinite square well model, we show the possible boundary conditions that avoid the existence of the negative energy states. The well-known boundary condition requiring the wave function be continuous on both sides of the well is one of the boundary conditions that avoids negative energy states. However, there are other types of boundary condition that can also avoid the negative energy states. This shows that there are the different branch of physical systems that can be established on the infinite square well model.