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arXiv:physics/0402069 · American Journal of Physics

An elementary derivation of the harmonic oscillator propagator

L. Moriconi

Published Aug 13, 2004• 16 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The harmonic oscillator propagator is found straightforwardly from the free particle propagator within the imaginary-time Feynman path integral formalism. The derivation is simple, and requires only elementary mathematical manipulations and no clever use of Hermite polynomials, annihilation and creation operators, cumbersome determinant evaluations, or involved algebra.

DOI
10.1119/1.1715108

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The harmonic oscillator propagator is found straightforwardly from the free particle propagator within the imaginary-time Feynman path integral formalism. The derivation is simple, and requires only elementary mathematical manipulations and no clever use of Hermite polynomials, annihilation and creation operators, cumbersome determinant evaluations, or involved algebra.
Operator algebra techniques are employed to derive the quantum evolution operator for the harmonic oscillator. The derivation begins with the construction of the annihilation and creation operators and the determination of the wave function for the coherent state as well as its time-dependent evolution, and ends with the transformation of the propagator in a mixed position-coherent-state representation to the desired one in configuration space. Throughout the entire procedure, besides elementary operator manipulations, it is only necessary to solve linear differential equations and to calculate Gaussian integrals.
We present a purely analytical method to calculate the propagator for the quantum harmonic oscillator using Feynman’s path integral. Though the details of the calculation are involved, the general approach uses only matrix diagonalization and well-known integrals, techniques which an advanced undergraduate should understand. The full propagator, including both the prefactor and the classical action, is obtained from a single calculation which involves the exact diagonalization of the discretized action for the system.