Central Forces
This chapter is dedicated to the study of particles in central potentials. Such potentials depend only on the distance of the particle subject to it from some center, usually the coordinate origin. We will find that the results on angular momentum derived in the previous chapter are useful for studying this problem. After developing the general formalism that we will employ, namely an effective one-dimensional Schrödinger equation with a potential given by the original potential plus a "centrifugal barrier" term, we will apply said formalism to several problems, such as the spherical potential well, the isotropic harmonic oscillator, and finally the hydrogen atom, which was a major part of the motivation for the development of quantum mechanics in the first place.