BOUND STATE WAVE FUNCTIONS THROUGH THE QUANTUM HAMILTON–JACOBI FORMALISM

Abstract

The bound state wave functions for a wide class of exactly solvable potentials are found by utilizing the quantum Hamilton–Jacobi formalism of Leacock and Padgett. It is shown that, exploiting the singularity structure of the quantum momentum function, until now used only for obtaining the bound state energies, one can straightforwardly find both the eigenvalues and the corresponding eigenfunctions. After demonstrating the working of this approach through a few solvable examples, we consider Hamiltonians, which exhibit broken and unbroken phases of supersymmetry. The natural emergence of the eigenspectra and the wave functions, in both unbroken and the algebraically nontrivial broken phase, demonstrates the utility of this formalism.