Perturbative solutions of quantum mechanical problems by symbolic computation (Q749182)

Symbolic computation is an effective alternative to many existing calculational methods for obtaining quantitative results. It represents the next level beyond the digital calculator as an efficient extension of the critical human mind. In this 30-page paper the authors have shown that the second author's decoupling technique is useful to achieve approximate solutions to the one particle Dirac equation, which is an example to meaningfully check the power of the new approach for solving quantum mechanical problems by perturbation theory. Here the use of an infinite basis set is avoided and each coefficient of the perturbation series is arrived at in a closed form. The techniques presented can be applied to other situations also and illustrations are given to indicate that symbolic computation has a great future.