The quantum mechanical Toda lattice, II

Abstract

The periodic Toda lattice consists of N particles which move along a closed line and are coupled with an exponential spring to their immediate neighbors. This system, in contrast to the open Toda lattice, has only bound states. In the method of Kac and Van Moerbeke, the classical periodic Toda chain is transformed to a new of set of canonically conjugate variables, μ and ν, which are closely related to the natural coordinates of an open Toda chain with one particle less. The quantum mechanical eigenfunctions for this reduced system are constructed explicitly, and this allows the quantum mechanical analogs of μ and ν to be defined. The bounds states for the periodic Toda chain are then written as linear combinations of functions resembling the wave functions of the reduced open chain. These functions satisfy a set of remarkably simple recursion formulas, and the coefficients in the expansion can be written essentially as a product of as many factors as pairs of conjugate variables μ and ν. Each factor is given as a solution of a second order difference equation which can be recognized as a quantum analog for the equations of motion of one pair μ and ν. The quantization conditions result from cancelling out the exponential growth in the overall wave function, and are phrased in terms of certain phase angles being submultiples of π according as the representation of the group of cyclic permutations. The calculations are simple for N = 3, and moderately tricky for N = 4 although the results are always fairly obvious.