Construction of Exact Ermakov-Pinney Solutions and Time-Dependent Quantum Oscillators

TL;DR

This paper develops a new method to construct exact solutions for time-dependent quantum oscillators using Ermakov-Pinney theory, linking classical solutions to quantum invariants and wave functions, including special potentials and perturbation approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to derive Ermakov-Pinney solutions and wave functions for a class of time-dependent oscillators, including special potentials and perturbative methods.

Findings

Established a connection between quantum invariants and Ermakov-Pinney solutions.

Derived exact wave functions for specific time-dependent potentials.

Proposed a perturbation method for slowly-varying frequencies.

Abstract

The harmonic oscillator with a time-dependent frequency has a family of linear quantum invariants for the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation, which are determined by any two independent solutions to the classical equation of motion. Ermakov and Pinney have shown that a general solution to the time-dependent oscillator with an inverse cubic term can be expressed in terms of two independent solutions to the time-dependent oscillator. We explore the connection between linear quantum invariants and the Ermakov-Pinney solution for the time-dependent harmonic oscillator. We advance a novel method to construct Ermakov-Pinney solutions to a class of time-dependent oscillators and the wave functions for the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation. We further show that the first and the second P\"{o}schl-Teller potentials belong to a special class of exact time-dependent oscillators. A perturbation method is proposed for any slowly-varying time-dependent frequency.