Vieweg+Teubner eBooks
Reformulation of the Schrödinger Equation
K. Wildermuth, Y. C. Tang
Abstract
A symmetrical treatment of the incoming and outgoing channels can be done in a basically very simple way by formulating the Schrödinger equation (1.1) in the form of a projection equation (see, e.g., ref. [WI 72]) (2.1) $$ \langle \delta \psi \left| {{\rm H} + \frac{\hbar }{i}\frac{\partial }{{\partial t}}} \right|\psi \rangle = 0 $$ As usual, the Dirac bracket denotes the integration over spatial coordinates and the summation over spin and isospin coordinates. If δΨ represents a completely arbitrary variation of Ψ at a given instant t in the complete Hilbert space, then eq. (2.1) implies that the vector $$ \left( {{\rm H} + \frac{\hbar }{i}\frac{\partial }{{\partial t}}} \right)\left| {\psi \rangle } \right. $$ must be orthogonal to any arbitrary vector in this space. This evidently will be the case only if Ψ obeys eq. (1.1). Therefore, eq. (2.1) is merely another formulation of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. However, as we shall see later, eq. (2.1) does allow us to treat the incoming and outgoing channels in a symmetrical way.