Semi-spectral Chebyshev method in quantum mechanics

Abstract

Traditionally, finite differences and finite element methods have been by many regarded as the basic tools for obtaining numerical solutions in a variety of quantum mechanical problems emerging in atomic, nuclear and particle physics, astrophysics, quantum chemistry, etc. In recent years, however, an alternative technique based on the semi-spectral methods has focused considerable attention. The purpose of this work is first to provide the necessary tools and subsequently examine the efficiency of this method in quantum mechanical applications. Restricting our interest to time-independent two-body problems, we obtained the continuous and discrete spectrum solutions of the underlying Schrödinger or Lippmann–Schwinger equations in both, the coordinate and momentum space. In all of the numerically studied examples we had no difficulty in achieving the machine accuracy and the semi-spectral method showed exponential convergence combined with excellent numerical stability.