Quantum Mechanics/Time Independent Schrödinger

Consider a particle confined to a one-dimensional box with impenetrable walls. When you solve the Schrödinger equation for the wavefunctions you get two sets of solutions: those of positive parity, and those of negative parity:

and

where n is any positive integer and A is a normalisation constant. Now, we can have all of these infinite states and if you've ever studied Fourier Analysis you may have noticed, with these states you can form any function you wish---that is, the wavefunctions are complete. So what have we learned? Well, a lot actually: we have discovered the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian which can be used to determine the particle's time dependance.

Derivation of the Time-Independent Schrödinger Equation edit

We start with the general Schrödinger Equation, and use separation of variables. We have

 

We separate   into two functions:

 

So now the Schrödinger Equation is

 

We know from earlier that the "interesting" part of the energy operator   is a partial derivative with respect to time, and the "interesting" part of the Hamiltonian   is a partial derivative with respect to position. As   does not depend on position, it is not affected by  . Similarly,   is not affected by  .

So we have:

 

We can multiply on the left by   to obtain

 

Note that the left side only depends on x, on the right side only depends on t. We have two functions which are totally indenpendent, but are somehow equal to each other. This is only possible if both functions are equal to a constant, which we call E.

i.e.

   

Naturally this implies

 

and

 

We can then expand   and   and solve this equation.