- #1
whatisreality
- 290
- 1
This isn't explained anywhere so it must be super basic and I'll probably kick myself for not getting it, but on the wiki page for time independent perturbation theory, section 3.1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perturbation_theory_(quantum_mechanics)
It talks about first order corrections and says if the perturbation is weak you can write E and ##|n\langle## as a Maclaurin series in ##\lambda##. Why can we and why would we do that? I've tried a number of sources including Griffiths and online lecture notes but I still don't get why that step is done, isn't E just a constant? Why can it be written as a power series of that particular form?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perturbation_theory_(quantum_mechanics)
It talks about first order corrections and says if the perturbation is weak you can write E and ##|n\langle## as a Maclaurin series in ##\lambda##. Why can we and why would we do that? I've tried a number of sources including Griffiths and online lecture notes but I still don't get why that step is done, isn't E just a constant? Why can it be written as a power series of that particular form?