Ti m e-Dep en d en t Per tu r b ati o n

Th eo r y

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Objective: To calculate the transition probability from a state |n> to a state |m>.These occur
under the influence of a perturbation ,which slightly displaces the system from equilibrium and
causes the transition. The perturbation is usually time dependent.
To calculate the change in the eigen state Ψ(r ,t) due to the perturbation, V(r ,t), we solve the
TDSE.

where H 0(r) is the operator for the total energy of the unperturbed system and V(r,t) is the
perturbing potential.
We first consider the unperturbed system
2
The stationary part of the wave function is assumed to
satisfy the eigen value equation

The solution is then of the form, 4

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The wave functions form a complete and orthonormal set and so the total wave function can be
expressed as a linear combination of the individual eigen functions for each state.

5
Inserting this into the TDSE 1( for
6 the perturbed system), and using
equation 3, we get on simplification,

We now use the property that two non identical states are orthogonal to each other, by
pre multiplying the above equation with and integrating over
all space to get:

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Let us assume that we have a harmonic potential. Then
and,

10
Substituting this into equation 9, we get,

11

What we have obtained is a complete set of equations for the expansion coefficients am (t) and
their time dependence. Matrix methods can be used to solve this problem but it is generally a
computationally taxing task.
The approach that we adopt is as follows. We assume that initially the system was in a state k
before the perturbation is turned on :

From the above expression, we have

To understand the meaning of these coefficients, consider the normalization of

It can also be shown that,

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The next task is to calculate the amplitude am(t), from the coupled set of differential equations. If
V(r,t) is small perturbation, we can make an approximation that even at t>0 we have, In
this case we only have to solve the following equation

12 Integrating this equation from 0 to t,

we get
1
13
0

14

15

The following can also be shown

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 To summarize, in the limit t->∞, the probability Wmk(t) is
The above limit can only be used in the case when one
scattering event is finished before the other starts i.e.,
when the scattering is infrequent .
Smk is called transition rate i.e., the probability for the transition in a time of interval t
15
The formula in equation 15 was named by Fermi (as
with some measure of importance) “The Golden Rule
”.

Summary of approximations made in deriving Fermi’

s Golden Rule
•Weak perturbation which gives no depletion of the initial state ak(t)=1 for all times
•The limit t->∞, can only be used when we are in a weak scattering regime. It led to
Energy conservation in the scattering process which is not necessarily satisfied under
heavy scattering.
Summary of Notation

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