Charmonium Mass Estimation: Trial Wavefunction for Variational Method

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Charmonium: estimating the mass - trial wavefunction for use in variational method??

Hi,

I need any suggestions of trial wavefunctions I can use to find an order of magnitude estimate for the mass of charmonium in the variational method.

I am ignoring coulombic effects (and relativistic) - just interested in the confinement aspect of the potential at the moment..

Can anybody help??!
 
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I think common potentials are either the "Cornell potential" V=-g^2/r+ar or
V=g^2/r+a ln(r).
 


Thanks for the suggestion! But yeah essentially I want to get an equation for the ground state energy in terms of the mass and then use known energies to make estimates for the mass... How can I go about this (without using computational methods..) - i thought using the variational method with a trial wavefunction - maybe an exponential one with a polynomial in r?? Any suggestions?!

If not... what are some of the general features of the wavefunction for charmonium so I can at least have an idea of what i need it to be?

Thanks!
 


I think the idea of looking at just the confining part is a bad idea.

The confining part is the long-distance part of the potential. If you want the ground state, that's the short-distance part.

I would pick a potential that has a 1/r Coulombic part and some confining part, and use the Coulombic wavefunction as the trial wavefunction: because we know what that wavefunction is exactly.
 
Insights auto threads is broken atm, so I'm manually creating these for new Insight articles. Towards the end of the first lecture for the Qiskit Global Summer School 2025, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Olivia Lanes (Global Lead, Content and Education IBM) stated... Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/quantum-entanglement-is-a-kinematic-fact-not-a-dynamical-effect/ by @RUTA
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