Unitary, continuum, stationary perturbation theory for the radial Schrödinger equation

Abstract

The commutators of the Poincaré group generators will be unchanged in form if a unitary transformation relates the free generators to the generators of an interacting relativistic theory. We test the concept of unitary transformations of generators in the nonrelativistic case, requiring that the free and interacting Hamiltonians be related by a unitary transformation. Other authors have applied this concept to time-dependent perturbation theory to give unitarity of the time evolution operator to each order in perturbation theory, with results that show improvement over the standard perturbation theory. In our case, a stationary perturbation theory can be constructed to find approximate solutions of the radial Schrödinger equation for scattering from a spherically symmetric potential. General formulae are obtained for the phase shifts at first and second order in the coupling constant. We test the method on a simple system with a known exact solution and find complete agreement between our first- and second-order contributions to the s-wave phase shifts and the corresponding expansion to second order of the exact solution.