Computationally efficient recurrence relations for one-dimensional Franck–Condon overlap integrals

Abstract

Calculations based on analytical expressions for the harmonic oscillator Franck–Condon factors often yield numerically unstable and erroneous results for large values of the oscillator quantum numbers. This instability arises from inherent machine precision limits and large number round-off associated with the products and ratios of factorial and gamma functions in these expressions; the analytical expressions themselves are exact. This paper presents, first, efficient, exact recurrence relations to evaluate Franck–Condon factors for the harmonic oscillator model. The recurrence relations, which are similar to those originally found by Manneback, Wagner and Ansbacher avoid the direct use of the factorial and gamma functions. Second, a variational strategy for the evaluation of Franck–Condon factors for the Morse oscillator is proposed. The Schrödinger equation for the Morse model is solved variationally with a large enough basis set of one-dimensional harmonic oscillator functions to get good agreement with the analytic eigenvalues of the Morse potential itself. The eigenvectors of this analysis are then used together with the associated harmonic oscillator Franck–Condon overlap matrix elements to evaluate the overlap for the Morse potential. This approach allows one, in principle, to estimate Franck–Condon overlap up to states near to the dissociation limit of the Morse oscillator.