How to Apply Hermite Polynomial for Physics Problems

  • Context: High School 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Alaguraja
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Polynomial
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
5 replies · 2K views
Alaguraja
Messages
7
Reaction score
1
I have doubt since a long time, that is How we apply the Hermite polynomial for a physics problem. And I don't know weather everyone known about how the analyze a physics problem and how do they apply a correct mathematical methods?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
This will clear your "ancient" doubt.
There are several ways that Hermite polynomials can be defined, but the one used by physicists is this: the Hermite polynomial of degree
latex.png
is defined as
latex.png
At first glance, this doesn’t look like a polynomial at all, since it contains only exponentials. But if we calculate the first few, we can see that we get a sequence of polynomials:

latex.png
latex.png
latex.png

latex.php
latex.png
latex.png

latex.png
latex.png
latex.png

latex.php
latex.png
latex.png

latex.png
latex.png
latex.png

latex.php
latex.png
latex.png
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: Alaguraja and vanhees71
Thank you Mr. John
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: John Dalton
The pleasure was all mine.
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: Alaguraja
You can find a short discussion of Hermite polynomials in a book on mathematical methods. I have the one written by Arfken, but I'm sure others (those by Boas or Riley) will cover it, too. An in-depth treatment is in Lebedev, Special Functions and Their Applications, which also has excellent coverage of the other important functions (polynomials, Bessel functions, spherical harmonics, etc.) with many physics applications. It's a Dover book so it's inexpensive.

Finally, Hermite polynomials are famous as the solution to the one dimensional quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillator. You can find this physics application in all quantum mechanics books. For an undergrad QM text, see any of the standards like Griffith, Shankar, Liboff, or an inexpensive used copy of E. Anderson.

As to the general question of how to solve physics problems, I think you need to start with a course or a basic physics text. It is traditional to start with mechanics.
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: vanhees71, Alaguraja and John Dalton
Thank you Mr.Marcus