A conditionally integrable bi-confluent Heun potential involving inverse square root and centrifugal barrier terms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new exactly solvable quantum potential involving inverse square root and centrifugal barrier terms, providing explicit solutions and energy spectra for bound states.

Contribution

It presents a conditionally integrable bi-confluent Heun potential with explicit solutions in terms of hypergeometric and Hermite functions, and derives accurate energy level approximations.

Findings

Explicit solutions for the Schrödinger equation with the potential

Exact and approximate formulas for bound state energies

Potential supports bound states with analytically characterized spectra

Abstract

We present a conditionally integrable potential, belonging to the bi-confluent Heun class, for which the Schr\"odinger equation is solved in terms of the confluent hypergeometric functions. The potential involves an attractive inverse square root term with arbitrary strength and a repulsive centrifugal barrier core with the strength fixed to a constant. This is a potential well defined on the half-axis. Each of the fundamental solutions composing the general solution of the Schr\"odinger equation is written as an irreducible linear combination, with non-constant coefficients, of two confluent hypergeometric functions. We present the explicit solution in terms of the non-integer order Hermite functions of scaled and shifted argument and discuss the bound states supported by the potential. We derive the exact equation for the energy spectrum and approximate that by a highly accurate transcendental equation involving trigonometric functions. Finally, we construct an accurate approximation for the bound-state energy levels.