CRC Press eBooks
Perturbation Theories without Wavefunction
Francisco Marcelo Fernández
Abstract
If the Hamiltonian operator depends on a parameter λ, which may be a particle charge or mass, a field strength, or simply a dummy parameter artificially introduced to apply perturbation theory, then the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of Hˆ will also depend on that parameter. If we differentiate < |(Hˆ − E)| >= 0 with respect to λ 〈 ∂ ∂λ ∣∣∣(Hˆ − E)∣∣∣ 〉 + 〈 ∣∣∣∣∣ ∂(Hˆ − E) ∂λ ∣∣∣∣∣ 〉 + 〈 ∣∣∣(Hˆ − E)∣∣∣ ∂ ∂λ 〉 = 0 (3.5) and take into account equation (3.2), then we obtain the Hellmann-Feynman theorem [25] ∂E ∂λ < | >= 〈 ∣∣∣∣∣ ∂Hˆ ∂λ ∣∣∣∣∣ 〉 , (3.6) or ∂E ∂λ = 〈 ∂Hˆ ∂λ 〉 (3.7) if is normalized to unity. In what follows we show that the general results just derived facilitate the application of pertur- bation theory.