English

Explicit Two-Sided Eigenvalue Bounds for Schr\"odinger Operators with Singular Potentials via Finite Element Method

Numerical Analysis 2026-05-07 v1 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first numerical algorithm for explicit, computable two-sided eigenvalue bounds for Schr\"odinger operators H = -Delta + V on R^N, N = 2,3, in the presence of both an unbounded potential and an unbounded domain. "Explicit" here means that all constants and ingredients are derived in closed form from the mesh, the potential, and a small set of explicit inequalities (Payne-Weinberger, Hardy, and explicit bounded-domain Sobolev embeddings); the conversion to fully verified(IEEE-754-safe, interval-arithmetic) enclosures is a separate verification step and is left for future work. In particular, singular attractive potentials of Coulomb type, V(x) = -Z/|x|, which model the hydrogen atom and the H_2^+ molecular ion, are covered by the theory. The method combines domain truncation to a bounded domain D(R) containing {|x| <= R} with an extension of Liu's Composite Enriched Crouzeix-Raviart (CECR) finite element method to sign-indefinite potentials. Upper bounds come from the standard conforming Galerkin method; lower bounds come from the CECR construction, whose gap to the exact eigenvalue closes as the mesh is refined. Numerical experiments on the 2D single- and two-centred Coulomb potentials and on the 3D hydrogen atom and H_2^+ molecular ion illustrate the algorithm and confirm the predicted convergence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.05177,
  title  = {Explicit Two-Sided Eigenvalue Bounds for Schr\"odinger Operators with Singular Potentials via Finite Element Method},
  author = {Xuefeng Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.05177},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

44 pages, 4 figures. The source includes the appendices and uses the standard LaTeX article class for arXiv compatibility

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:53:16.641Z