The Schrödinger equation

The Hamiltonian operator for motion in three dimensions is

The Laplacian, (read ‘del squared’), is a convenient abbreviation for

the sum of the three second derivatives. For the particle confined to a
spherical surface, V = 0 wherever it is free to travel and Hamiltonian
operator becomes,

𝑍 𝑃 (𝑥 , 𝑦 , 𝑧)
To take advantage of the symmetry of the problem and the fact that r ⃗
𝜃𝑟
is a constant for a particle on a sphere, we use spherical polar
coordinates, the radius r, the colatitude θ, and the azimuth φ as 𝑋
shown in Fig. 1, with 𝜙
𝑌
And the Laplacian in the spherical polar coordinate is Fig. 1 The surface of sphere is
covered by allowing to range from
to , and then sweeping that arc
around a complete circle by
allowing to range from to
Because r is constant, we can discard the part of the Laplacian that involves
differentiation with respect to r, and so write the Schrödinger equation as

The moment of inertia, , has appeared. This expression can be rearranged into

Inserting Langarian, in the above equation leads

In equation (7), the wavefunction, depends on both and variables. To separate

variable, we try to substitute in equation (7)
Which gives

Division through by , multiplication by , and minor rearrangement give

The first term on the left depends only on and the remaining two terms depend only on . The
argument used is that each term is equal to a constant. Thus, if we set the first term equal to the
numerical constant , the separated equations are
Rearrangement of equation (12) leads

The equation (11) is the same as the Schrodinger equation of a particle moving of a
circular path and has the normalized solution of the form

where, is the magnetic quantum number.

However, the equation (13) is new and to solve this equation, let us consider a function

Then, differentiating the equation (15) with respect x gives

Differentiating this equation times, using Leibnitz theorem and rearranging, we obtain,

The particular function defined in equation (19) is called Legendre’s polynomial of

degree .
Let us assume a function

Where, is a positive integer

Now Eq. (17) becomes
Inserting this function into equation (17), we obtain a differential equation

This equation is known as Associated Legendre equation and the function usually written as is
called the Associated Legendre polynomial of degree and order where . Thus
When we write , the equation (22) becomes

And the solution of this equation is

On comparing Eq. (13) with Eq. (24), we see that the two equations are the
same except for the variables, and we obtain

The solutions of eq. (13) are, thus, Associated Legendre’s polynomials, of

degree and order , where is either zero or a positive integer and . The
solutions are given by
The normalized solutions are given by

The product of and is denoted by . For a given values of and ,the normalized wave functions,
are called the spherical harmonics and given by
The for some and are given in Table1.