Two-Dimensional Oscillator in Magnetic Field

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
The two-dimensional problem of a charged isotropic harmonic oscillator in a constant magnetic field can be solved exactly, as worked out in the Details. You can choose to display: (1) a contour plot of the solutions; (2) the radial distribution function in cylindrical coordinates; or (3) an energy-level diagram. You can select the oscillator frequency , the magnetic field
and the quantum numbers
and
. In the contour plots, positive and negative regions are colored blue and yellow, respectively.
Contributed by: S. M. Blinder (March 2019)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
For a charged particle (charge , mass
) in a magnetic field, the canonical form for the nonrelativistic Hamiltonian is given by
,
where is the vector potential. The magnetic field is given by
. We consider an electron (
) confined to the
-
plane, bound by an isotropic harmonic-oscillator potential and subjected to a constant magnetic field
in the
direction. This field can be represented by the vector potential
, such that
,
,
.
The Schrödinger equation, in Cartesian coordinates, can then be written
.
Expanding the squares, we obtain
.
Note now that , the
component of angular momentum, and that
, the Larmor frequency for an electron. It is convenient now to transform to cylindrical coordinates (
), such that
, which is an eigenfunction of
with eigenvalues
,
. The radial function
satisfies the equation
,
where . This has the form of the unperturbed two-dimensional oscillator and has the solutions (unnormalized, using atomic units
):
,
,
where is an associated Laguerre polynomial. The corresponding energies are
.
Using atomic units and expressing in teslas (T),
. The energy, expanded in powers of the magnetic field, is then given by
.
Permanent Citation