Two-body neutral Coulomb system in a magnetic field at rest: from Hydrogen atom to positronium

TL;DR

This paper develops a highly accurate uniform approximation for the wavefunctions of a two-body Coulomb system in a magnetic field, covering hydrogen-like and positronium atoms, with detailed analysis and numerical validation.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, accurate variational wavefunction and derives equations describing the system across all distances, applicable to various two-body Coulomb systems in magnetic fields.

Findings

Achieves 6 significant digits accuracy in total energy calculations.

Provides a 10-parameter trial function interpolating small and large distance behaviors.

Calculates perturbative coefficients and applies Padé-Borel resummation for energy estimates.

Abstract

A simple locally accurate uniform approximation for the nodeless wavefunction is constructed for a {\it neutral} system of two Coulomb charges of different masses $(-q,m_1)$ and $(q,m_2)$ at rest in a constant uniform magnetic field for the states of positive and negative parity, ${(1s_0)}$ and ${(2p_0)}$, respectively. It is shown that by keeping the mass and charge of one of the bodies fixed, all systems with different second body masses are related. This allows one to consider the second body as infinitely-massive and to take such a system as basic. Three physical systems are considered in details: the Hydrogen atom with (in)-finitely massive proton (deuteron, triton) and the positronium atom $(-e,e)$. We derive the Riccati-Bloch and Generalized-Bloch equations, which describe the domains of small and large distances, respectively. Based on the interpolation of the small and large distance behavior of the logarithm of the wavefunction, a compact 10-parametric function is proposed. Taken as a variational trial function it provides accuracy of not less than 6 significant digits (s.d.) ($\lesssim 10^{-6}$ in relative deviation) for the total energy in the whole domain of considered magnetic fields $[0\,,\,10^4]$ a.u. and not less than 3 s.d. for the quadrupole moment $Q_{zz}$. In order to get reference points the Lagrange Mesh Method with 16K mesh points was used to get from 10 to 6 s.d. in energy from small to large magnetic fields. Based on the Riccati-Bloch equation the first 100 perturbative coefficients for the energy, in the form of rational numbers, are calculated and, using the Pad\'e-Borel re-summation procedure, the energy is found with not less than 10 s.d. at magnetic fields $\leq 1$\,a.u.