Constructing Hermitian Hamiltonians for spin zero neutral and charged particles on a curved surface : physical approach

TL;DR

This paper develops a new physical approach to derive Hermitian Hamiltonians for spin-zero particles constrained to curved surfaces, clarifying the origin of geometric potentials and connecting with existing thin-layer quantization methods.

Contribution

It introduces a method starting from Hermitian 3D momentum operators to construct Hermitian surface Hamiltonians, elucidating the geometric potential's origin and linking with prior approaches.

Findings

Hermitian surface Hamiltonians include geometric potential terms.

Normal and surface momenta emerge naturally as Hermitian operators.

The approach clarifies the origin of geometric potential from operator symmetrization.

Abstract

The surface Hamiltonian for a spin zero particle that is pinned to a surface by letting the thickness of a layer surrounding the surface go to zero -- assuming a strong normal force -- is constructed. The new approach we follow to achieve this is to start with an expression for the 3D momentum operators whose components along the surface and the normal to the surface are separately Hermitian. The normal part of the kinetic energy operator is a Hermitian operator in this case. When this operator is dropped and the thickness of the layer is set to zero, one automatically gets the Hermitian surface Hamiltonian that contains the geometric potential term as expected. Hamiltonians for both a neutral and a charged particle in an electromagnetic field are constructed. We show that a Hermitian surface and normal momenta emerge automatically once one symmetrizes the usual normal and surface momentum operators. The present approach makes it manifest that the geometrical potential originates from the term that is added to the surface momentum operator to render it Hermitian; this term itself emerges from symmetrization/ordering of differential momentum operators in curvilinear coordinates. We investigate the connection between this approach and the similar approach of Jenssen and Koppe and Costa ( the so called Thin-Layer Quantization (TLQ)). We note that the critical transformation of the wavefunction introduced there before taking the thickness of the layer to zero actually -- while not noted explicitly stated by the authors -- renders each of the surface and normal kinetic energy operators Hermitian by itself, which is just what our approach does from the onset.