Power-like potentials: from the Bohr-Sommerfeld energies to exact ones

TL;DR

This paper compares Bohr-Sommerfeld energies with exact energies for one-dimensional power-like potentials, demonstrating how WKB corrections can accurately reproduce the spectra and eigenfunctions, especially for physically important cases.

Contribution

It introduces explicit formulas for WKB corrections and energy spectra for quartic and sextic oscillators, enhancing the accuracy of semi-classical approximations.

Findings

BSE are above exact energies for positive parity states

WKB correction  small and bounded for all m  1

Explicit high-accuracy formulas for spectra and eigenfunctions for quartic and sextic oscillators

Abstract

For one-dimensional power-like potentials $|x|^m, m > 0$ the Bohr-Sommerfeld Energies (BSE) extracted explicitly from the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization condition are compared with the exact energies. It is shown that for the ground state as well as for all positive parity states the BSE are always above the exact ones contrary to the negative parity states where BSE remain above the exact ones for $m>2$ but they are below them for $m < 2$. The ground state BSE as the function of $m$ are of the same order of magnitude as the exact energies for linear $(m=1)$, quartic $(m=4)$ and sextic $(m=6)$ oscillators but relative deviation grows with $m$ reaching the value 4 at $m=\infty$. For physically important cases $m=1,4,6$ for the $100$th excited state BSE coincide with exact ones in 5-6 figures. It is demonstrated that modifying the right-hand-side of the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization condition by introducing the so-called {\it WKB correction} $\gamma$ (coming from the sum of higher order WKB terms taken at the exact energies) to the so-called exact WKB condition one can reproduce the exact energies. It is shown that the WKB correction is small, bounded function $|\gamma| < 1/2$ for all $m \geq 1$, it is slow growing with increase in $m$ for fixed quantum number, while it decays with quantum number growth at fixed $m$. For the first time for quartic and sextic oscillators the WKB correction and energy spectra (and eigenfunctions) are written explicitly in closed analytic form with high relative accuracy $10^{-9 \ -11}$ (and $10^{-6}$).