Spherical confinement of Coulombic systems inside an impenetrable box: H atom and the Hulth\'en potential

TL;DR

This paper uses the generalized pseudospectral method to analyze spherical confinement effects on hydrogen atoms and Hulthén potentials, providing accurate eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, and critical cage radii across various states and cavity sizes.

Contribution

It offers highly accurate eigenvalues and critical radii for confined Coulombic systems, improving upon previous results, especially for the Hulthén potential.

Findings

Accurate eigenvalues and eigenfunctions for confined H atom and Hulthén potential.

Better estimates of critical cage radius for H atom states.

Consistently high-quality results for various cavity sizes.

Abstract

The generalized pseudospectral method is employed to study spherical confinement in two simple Coulombic systems: (i) well celebrated and heavily studied H atom (ii) relatively less explored Hulth\'en potential. In both instances, arbitrary cavity size, as well as low and higher states are considered. Apart from bound state eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, expectation values, quite accurate estimates of the critical cage radius for H atom for all the 55 states corresponding to $n \leq 10$, are also examined. Some of the latter are better than previously reported values. Degeneracy and energy ordering under the isotropic confinement situation are discussed as well. The method produces consistently high-quality results for both potentials for small as well as large cavity size. For the H atom, present results are comparable to best theoretical values, while for the latter, this work gives considerably better estimates than all existing work so far.