HARMONIC OSCILLATOR - CHANGE IN SPRING CONSTANT

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Post date: 18 Jul 2012.
Reference: Griffiths, David J. (2005), Introduction to Quantum Mechan-
ics, 2nd Edition; Pearson Education - Problem 2.14.
Suppose we have a harmonic oscillator that starts off in the ground state,
with frequency ω. If nothing changes in this system, the oscillator will
remain in the ground state. However, if we quadruple the spring constant
k, this will cause a change in the frequency, since k = mω 2 . Thus ω will
double to a new value ω 0 = 2ω. In terms of this new frequency, we have

Ψ(x, 0) = ψ0 (x) (1)

 mω 1/4 2
= e−mωx /2h̄ (2)
πh̄
mω 0 1/4 −mω0 x2 /4h̄
 
= e (3)
2πh̄
After the change in the spring constant, the new stationary states will
be the functions ψ00 , ψ10 , . . . which have the same form as the original ψn
functions except ω is replaced by ω 0 . Thus the new ground state is
1/4
mω 0

0 2 /2h̄
ψ00 (x) = e−mω x (4)
πh̄
The energy of this state is h̄ω 0 /2 = h̄ω. Since this is the new ground state,
the probability of finding the energy at the old value of h̄ω/2 is now zero,
since the energy cannot be less than the ground state energy.
To find the probability that the energy is the ground state energy of h̄ω,
we expand the original wave function in terms of the new stationary states
and find the coefficient c0 of the first term in the expansion. That is

∞
Ψ(x, 0) = ∑ cnψn0 (x) (5)
n=0

Since the ψn0 are orthogonal functions, we can use the usual method of
calculating c0 :
1
 HARMONIC OSCILLATOR - CHANGE IN SPRING CONSTANT 2

ˆ a
c0 = Ψ(x, 0)ψ00 dx (6)
0
 ˆ
mω 0 1/4 mω 0 1/4 ∞ −mω0 x2 /4h̄ −mω0 x2 /2h̄
  
= e e dx (7)
2πh̄ πh̄ −∞
 ˆ
mω 0 1/2 ∞ −3mω0 x2 /4h̄

1
= 1/4 e dx (8)
2 πh̄ −∞
mω 0 1/2 2 3πh̄ 1/2
   
1
= 1/4 (9)
2 πh̄ 3 mω 0
23/4
= (10)
31/2
The probability of being in the ground state is thus

23/2
|c0 |2 = (11)
3
= 0.9428 (12)