Abstract
We tend to be hardwired to think in terms of Cartesian coordinates; this is the coordinate system we are first introduced to in school, and generally our first approach when solving an unknown problem. We can avoid this bias, as we saw earlier, by using basis diagonalisation with a non-Cartesian basis set. However, there are some situations where spherical coordinates are a much better fit, and there is no better example than central potentials –– potentials that only depend on radial distance.
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Izaac, J., Wang, J. (2018). Central potentials. In: Computational Quantum Mechanics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99930-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99930-2_12
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