Quantum Harmonic Oscillator

Abstract

After having finished his chemistry studies, Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) devoted himself to Italian painting for many years and then took up botany and published a series of papers on plant phylogeny. During the years 1906 to 1910, as a student at the University of Vienna, he was greatly influenced by Fritz Hasenöhrl’s lectures on theoretical physics. He then acquired a mastery of eigenvalue problems in the physics of continuous media, thus laying the foundation of his future important work. Moving very often, he occupied many academic positions starting as assistant to Max Wien (1866–1938). His most fruitful period took place when he replaced Max von Laue (1879–1960) at the University of Zürich, where he enjoyed contacts, in particular, with Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) who was to provide the deep mathematical knowledge that would prove so helpful to Schrödinger. Having never been very satisfied by the quantum condition on orbits in Niels Bohr’s (1885–1962) atomic model, he believed that atomic spectra should be determined by some kind of eigenvalue problem. In 1926, he discovered the wave equation that bears his name. In 1933, “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory,” he shared with Paul Adrien Dirac (1902–1984) the Nobel Prize in Physics.