Abstract
The harmonic oscillator is one of the most invoked physical systems in the formulation of simple, but illustrative models of real systems, which require a more involved formalism. The harmonic oscillator has been used, for example, to model atoms in the blackbody walls and atomic vibrations in crystalline systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Frequently orthogonal polynomials fulfill a three-term recurrence relation.
- 2.
\(\mathbf{ k}_i\) refers to the wave vector and \(\gamma \) to the polarization.
- 3.
This corresponds to radiation-field wavelengths much larger than the system size.
- 4.
See for example the excellent book by Yehuda B. Band, Light and Matter, John Wiley & Sons, West Sussex, England, 2006.
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Pereyra Padilla, P. (2012). Harmonic Oscillator . In: Fundamentals of Quantum Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29378-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29378-8_8
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