No Arabic abstract
We introduce a numerical method to obtain approximate eigenvalues for some problems of Sturm-Liouville type. As an application, we consider an infinite square well in one dimension in which the mass is a function of the position. Two situations are studied, one in which the mass is a differentiable function of the position depending on a parameter $b$. In the second one the mass is constant except for a discontinuity at some point. When the parameter $b$ goes to infinity, the function of the mass converges to the situation described in the second case. One shows that the energy levels vary very slowly with $b$ and that in the limit as $b$ goes to infinity, we recover the energy levels for the second situation.
We find supersymmetric partners of a family of self-adjoint operators which are self-adjoint extensions of the differential operator $-d^2/dx^2$ on $L^2[-a,a]$, $a>0$, that is, the one dimensional infinite square well. First of all, we classify these self-adjoint extensions in terms of several choices of the parameters determining each of the extensions. There are essentially two big groups of extensions. In one, the ground state has strictly positive energy. On the other, either the ground state has zero or negative energy. In the present paper, we show that each of the extensions belonging to the first group (energy of ground state strictly positive) has an infinite sequence of supersymmetric partners, such that the $ell$-th order partner differs in one energy level from both the $(ell-1)$-th and the $(ell+1)$-th order partners. In general, the eigenvalues for each of the self-adjoint extensions of $-d^2/dx^2$ come from a transcendental equation and are all infinite. For the case under our study, we determine the eigenvalues, which are also infinite, {all the extensions have a purely discrete spectrum,} and their respective eigenfunctions for all of its $ell$-th supersymmetric partners of each extension.
A Gedanken experiment is described to explore a counter-intuitive property of quantum mechanics. A particle is placed in a one-dimensional infinite well. The barrier on one side of the well is suddenly removed and the chamber dramatically enlarged. At specific, periodically recurring, times the particle can be found with probability one at the opposite end of the enlarged chamber in an interval of the same size as the initial well. With the help of symmetry considerations these times are calculated and shown to be dependent on the mass of the particle and the size of the enlarged chamber. Parameter ranges are given, where the non-relativistic nature of standard quantum mechanics becomes particularly apparent.
Certain superposition states of the 1-D infinite square well have transient zeros at locations other than the nodes of the eigenstates that comprise them. It is shown that if an infinite potential barrier is suddenly raised at some or all of these zeros, the well can be split into multiple adjacent infinite square wells without affecting the wavefunction. This effects a change of the energy eigenbasis of the state to a basis that does not commute with the original, and a subsequent measurement of the energy now reveals a completely different spectrum, which we call the {interference energy spectrum} of the state. This name is appropriate because the same splitting procedure applied at the stationary nodes of any eigenstate does not change the measurable energy of the state. Of particular interest, this procedure can result in measurable energies that are greater than the energy of the highest mode in the original superposition, raising questions about the conservation of energy akin to those that have been raised in the study of superoscillations. An analytic derivation is given for the interference spectrum of a given wavefunction $Psi(x,t)$ with $N$ known zeros located at points $s_i = (x_i, t_i)$. Numerical simulations were used to verify that a barrier can be rapidly raised at a zero of the wavefunction without significantly affecting it. The interpretation of this result with respect to the conservation of energy and the energy-time uncertainty relation is discussed, and the idea of alternate energy eigenbases is fleshed out. The question of whether or not a preferred discrete energy spectrum is an inherent feature of a particles quantum state is examined.
Many synthetic quantum systems allow particles to have dispersion relations that are neither linear nor quadratic functions. Here, we explore single-particle scattering in one dimension when the dispersion relation is $epsilon(k)=pm |d|k^m$, where $mgeq 2$ is an integer. We study impurity scattering problems in which a single-particle in a one-dimensional waveguide scatters off of an inhomogeneous, discrete set of sites locally coupled to the waveguide. For a large class of these problems, we rigorously prove that when there are no bright zero-energy eigenstates, the $S$-matrix evaluated at an energy $Eto 0$ converges to a universal limit that is only dependent on $m$. We also give a generalization of a key index theorem in quantum scattering theory known as Levinsons theorem -- which relates the scattering phases to the number of bound states -- to impurity scattering for these more general dispersion relations.
Recently, various non-classical properties of quantum states and channels have been characterized through an advantage they provide in specific quantum information tasks over their classical counterparts. Such advantage can be typically proven to be quantitative, in that larger amounts of quantum resources lead to better performance in the corresponding tasks. So far, these characterizations have been established only in the finite-dimensional setting. In this manuscript, we present a technique for extending the known results to the infinite-dimensional regime. The technique relies on approximating infinite-dimensional resource measures by their finite-dimensional counterparts. We give a sufficient condition for the approximation procedure to be tight, i.e. to match with established infinite-dimensional resource quantifiers, and another sufficient condition for the procedure to match with relevant extensions of these quantifiers. We show that various continuous variable quantum resources fall under these conditions, hence, giving them an operational interpretation through the advantage they can provide in so-called quantum games. Finally, we extend the interpretation to the max relative entropy in the infinite-dimensional setting.