Quantum Anharmonic Oscillators: A Truncated Matrix Approach

This study aims at implementing a truncated matrix approach based on harmonic oscillator eigenfunctions to calculate energy eigenvalues of anharmonic oscillators containing quadratic, quartic, sextic, octic, and decic anharmonicities. The accuracy of the matrix method is also tested. Using this method, the wave functions of the anharmonic oscillators were written as a linear combination of some finite number of harmonic oscillator basis states. Results showed that calculation with 100 basis states generated accurate energies of oscillators with relatively small coupling constants, with computation time less than 1 minute. Including more basis states could result in more correct digits. For instance, using 300 harmonic oscillator basis states in a simple Mathematica code in about 8 minutes, highly accurate energies of the oscillators were obtained for relatively small coupling constants, with up to 15 correct digits. Reasonable accuracy was also found for much larger coupling constants with at least three correct digits for some low lying energies of the oscillators reported in this study. Some of our results contained more correct digits than other results reported in the literature.