English

Spherical Harmonic Oscillators

Mathematical Physics 2025-10-21 v2 math.MP

Abstract

A linear quantum harmonic oscillator factors into one dimensional oscillators and can be solved using creation and annihilation operators. We consider a spherical analogue. This analogue does not factor. The two dimensional case is critical, and we compute the spectrum and partition function. This is of interest because the spherical oscillator is potentially relevant to chiral models in 2d quantum field theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.23549,
  title  = {Spherical Harmonic Oscillators},
  author = {Van Higgs and Doug Pickrell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.23549},
  year   = {2025}
}