1. Introduction
Nearly 60 years ago, Bose [
1,
2] made a revolutionary discovery that the most solvable potentials known at that time can be obtained by the ‘Liouville transformation’ [
3,
4] of some special cases of a rational Sturm–Liouville equation [
4] written in its canonical (no first derivative) form and simply referred to below as ‘RCSLE’. Several years later, the author [
5] made use of Bose’s discovery to construct the family of rational potentials
exactly solvable in terms of superpositions of two hypergeometric functions of a
real variable as well as its confluent counterpart exactly solvable in terms of superpositions of confluent hypergeometric series and Whittaker function (see, e.g., Ch. 5 and Ch. 6 in [
3]). It was shown that the corresponding eigenfunctions are expressible in terms of
classical Jacobi and
classical Laguerre polynomials with
degree-dependent indexes in general. Thereby, we refer to these two families of solvable rational potentials as ‘Jacobi-reference’ (
Ref) and ‘Laguerre-reference’ (
Ref) potentials.
The Bose approach was further advanced by Milson [
6], who demonstrated that there is another family of solvable potentials obtained by the Liouville transformation of the real Fuschian SLE with two poles at complex-conjugated points. It was proven by us later [
7] under the influence of Alvarez-Castillo and Kirchbach’s breakthrough paper [
8] that the eigenfunctions of this RCSLE are expressible in terms of Romanovski–Routh (R–Routh) polynomials with degree-dependent indexes. (For the reasons explained in [
9,
10], we prefer to refer to pseudo-Jacobi polynomials [
11,
12,
13] as Routh polynomials [
14], so the epithet ‘R–Routh polynomials’ is fully consistent with the term ‘Romanovski/pseudo-Jacobi polynomials’ in Leski’s [
15,
16] classification scheme of Romanovski polynomials [
17,
18]).
While making some inspirational remarks on the original draft of [
19], Kirchbach drew the author’s attention to the reference to Milson’s paper [
6] in the brand-new review article [
20]. It became clear that Milson has already addressed this problem to a large extent. However, our study revealed some new important elements not discussed in [
6]. First, it was shown that hypergeometric polynomials constructed in [
6] are nothing but R–Routh polynomials. Secondly, the author took advantage of Stevenson’s idea [
21] (also pointed to the author by Kirchbach) to express an analytically continued solution in terms of hypergeometric polynomials in a complex argument. It was just confirmed that the latter
formally complex polynomials can be converted to real R–Routh polynomials in the real argument and that the Sturm–Liouville problem in question is indeed exactly solvable.
Our current analysis explicitly takes advantage of the interconnection [
8] between the real R–Routh polynomials and Jacobi polynomials with complex-conjugated indexes, provided that the argument of the complex polynomials is restricted to the imaginary axis [
22,
23]. To our knowledge, it was Bagrov et al. [
24] who brought the latter polynomials into the quantum mechanics using them as polynomial components of the eigenfunctions for the
very unique trigonometric limit of the potentials solvable in terms of the R–Routh polynomials—the so-called ‘Rosen–Morse II’ potential in the Cooper–Khare–Sukhatme (CKS) [
25,
26] classification scheme of solvable rational potentials. In following [
27], we refer to this trigonometric modification of the Rosen–Morse potential [
28] simply as ‘
t-RM’. The cited textbook [
24] made no mathematical references and did not provide any arguments in support of the conjecture that the constructed eigenfunctions are real.
A few years later, Dabrowska et al. [
29] ran into these polynomials while examining the eigenfunctions for the Gendenshtein potential [
30] (the Scarf II potential in the CKS classification scheme [
25,
26]). The cited authors explicitly computed the first three eigenfunctions and did confirm that they are real and mutually orthogonal. Under the evident influence of these authors, Lévai [
31], in his search for ‘shape-invariant’ [
30] rational potentials, extended to
complex Jacobi polynomials the systematic method suggested by Bhattacharjie and Sudarshan [
32] for constructing potentials exactly solvable via classical Jacobi polynomials. He found that the list of shape-invariant potentials compiled in [
29] missed the aforementioned
t-RM potential.
Though the fact that the eigenvalues of the
Ref CSLE coincide with one of real roots of a quartic equation was originally recognized by Grosche [
33], it was Lévai [
34] who proved that the average of the Jacobi indexes of the polynomial forming a ‘quasi-rational’ [
35] eigenfunction is determined by a root of a similar quartic equation in the particular case of an even density function. It was originally overlooked by the author [
7,
10] that Lévai (apparently unaware of Milson’s paper [
6]) implicitly discussed both
Ref and Routh-reference (‘
Ref’) CSLEs with even density functions. (We use the epithet ‘
Ref’ to stress that the CSLE in question have ‘quasi-rational’ [
35] solutions (q-RSs) expressible in terms of Routh polynomials.) In particular, the quartic equation derived by us [
7] for complex-conjugated indexes of the Jacobi polynomials forming eigenfunctions of the
Ref CSLE happened to be another representation for the equation obtained by Lévai [
34] in a more general context. In following the terminology suggested in our papers [
7,
36,
37], we refer to the numerator of the rational density function in the RCSLEs of our interest as the ‘tangent polynomial’ (TP), so we term the Liouville potential associated with the even density function as the ‘
e-TP’ potential for briefness.
In [
38], Lévai presented a more thorough analysis comparing his approach [
31,
34,
39] and our original technique [
5] used for constructing the general 1D Schrödinger equation exactly solvable via a superposition of hypergeometric functions. An examination of his arguments illuminated in the next section revealed that, while starting from the complex Jacobi equation, Lévai implicitly converts it to the CSLE initially introduced by us [
5] under the real field, with the only (though very important for his analysis) difference being that the new CSLE was expressed in terms of the variable 2z(x) − 1 instead of the variable z(x) used in [
5] to convert the 1D Schrödinger equation to the hypergeometric equation in z. Obviously, the conversion of the CSLE by a linear transformation of the variable may not affect the results, so there is no surprise that introducing the solved-by-polynomials equation [
31] and then converting it to its canonical form leads to exactly the same results as the Bose technique [
1,
2] directly starting from the resultant CSLE. Contrary to Lévai’s assertion in [
40], it is the new variable (not the difference in the approach) ‘suits better the formulation of solvable
-symmetric potentials than that in [
5]’. The author has already taken advantage of this variable introduced in Lévai’s earlier works [
31,
39] while discussing the exactly solvable
Ref and
Ref problems in parallel in [
19]. Regrettably, this re-examination of our original study [
5] (as well as its extension by Milson [
6]) was disregarded in Lévai’s papers [
38,
40,
41] (see
Section 2 for more details).
Though the primary focus of this paper is the real rational Sturm–Liouville problems solvable by polynomials, we (under the influence of Lévai’s cited works [
31,
39]) start our analysis in
Section 2 from a complex (non-self-adjoint) RCSLE such that its two real-field reductions result in the
self-adjoint RCSLEs with
Ref and
Ref Liouville potentials. It is worth stressing in this context that our persistent references to the Schrödinger equation with solvable rational potentials are made solely because the RCSLEs represented in their Liouville form have broad applications in quantum mechanics and are much better known to scientists. Also, note that Everitt’s [
4] catalogue of Sturm–Liouville differential equations includes some renowned examples of the solvable
Ref and
Ref Liouville potentials, while disregarding their generalizations presented in our paper [
5] as well as the extension of our technique to the Fuschian RCSLE with two poles on the imaginary axis [
6].
In
Section 3, we present a unified approach to the Liouville potentials of the
Ref and
Ref CSLEs with even density functions by treating them as two real branches of the generally complex potential of the ‘Lévai class’. We term these two branches as Lévai
’s and Milson’s
e-TP potentials. The new element of our analysis of Lévai
’s e-TP potential, compared with [
34], is the proof [
36] that the (n + 1)-th eigenfunction (specified by the label
c in our notation) for ‘nearly symmetric’ potentials is accompanied by a triplet of q-RSs composed of Jacobi polynomials of the same degree n which belong to three different types
a,
b, and
d. Since any solution vanishing at one of the quantization ends (types
a and
b) and lying below the ground-energy level are necessarily nodeless [
42], the q-RSs of these two types can be used as the factorization functions (FFs) for the so-called [
43] ‘rational Darboux transformations’ (RDTs) giving rise to new exactly solvable rational potentials [
37]. We also point to some important details in both Milson’s [
6] and our [
7,
10] papers which are absent in Lévai
’s sketch of this little-known problem of exactly solvable in terms of R–Routh polynomials with degree-dependent indexes.
As has been already asserted by Lévai [
34], the symmetric reduction of the
Ref potential is nothing but an alternative representation for the Ginocchio potential on the line [
44]. Though the assertion itself happened to be correct [
45], the interrelationship between the two alternative parametrizations of the Ginocchio potential examined in
Section 4 turned out to be much more complicated than one would expect based on Lévai’s observation that the quartic equations for the averaged Jacobi indexes in both quantization schemes may be rewritten in the unified fashion.
The most important consequence of the presented proof is that, in addition to the renowned quantization scheme by classical Gegenbauer polynomials [
44], the cited symmetric potential can be alternatively quantized by R–Routh polynomials of a definite parity termed by us [
7,
45] as ‘Masjed-Jamei polynomials’ to give credit to the scrupulous analysis of these polynomials in [
46]. In other words, the RCSLEs with even
Ref [
44] and even
Ref [
7] Bose invariants constitute the same spectral problem unambiguously defined by the common Liouville form of its two rational realizations—the main result of this study proven in
Section 4.
2. Quartic Equation for the Average of Indexes of Jacobi Polynomial Forming a q-RS of Complex Fuschian CSLE with Three Singular Points
Let us start our analysis from the
complex (non-self-adjoint) Fuschian CSLE with three singular points
representing its Bose invariant [
1,
2,
6] as
with both reference polynomial fraction (RefPF)
and the density function
having second-order poles at η = ±1. Note that, in contrast with
RefPF (3), Bose invariant (2) also depends on the coefficients of the TP of degree K ≤ 2:
where
The real-field self-adjoint reduction of
Ref CSLE (1) was initially introduced by us in [
19] to treat
Ref and
Ref CSLEs in parallel, to a large extent under the influence of Lévai’s renowned papers [
31,
39]. Examination of (4) in [
38] shows that
while Lévai’s second-order differential Equation (2) can be rewritten as
with
and
Note that the parameters
and
in (9) in [
38] are related to the coefficients a,
of TP (5) in the trivial fashion:
Lévai’s starting Formula (13) in [
38], with
in our notation, is nothing but the conventional representation of the given Liouville potential rewritten as
where the Schwarzian derivative
is expressed in terms of η (cf. (2.6) in [
19]), provided that the change of variable
satisfies the ordinary differential equation (ODE)
with prime denoting the derivative with respect to x. The parameters
and
in the mentioned formula (or similarly in (1.29) in [
41]) are thus related to the parameters
of
RefPF (3) above as follows:
Disregarding the enhancements suggested by us in [
19], Lévai simply compared his approach with our initial scheme [
5] using the variable z(x) satisfying the ODE
This transformation converts the Schrödinger equation into the
Ref CSLE with the Bose invariant
where
are the coefficients of the TP
Though our initial technique [
5] dealing with hypergeometric functions of the variable z ∈ (0, 1) is necessary to prove that the given potential is indeed exactly solvable (as well as to derive close-form expressions for the scattering amplitudes [
47,
48]), the use of the variable η = 2z − 1 ∈ (−1, 1) allows one to treat
Ref and
Ref potentials in a symmetric fashion and also makes it easier to examine
-symmetric reductions of the complex
RefPF potential as it has been done by Lévai [
34,
38,
40,
41]. Obviously, the conversion of the CSLE by a linear transformation of the variable may not affect the results, so there is no surprise that starting from the solved-by-polynomials equation [
31] and then converting it to the canonical form leads to exactly the same results as the Bose technique [
1,
2] directly starting from the resultant CSLE. Lévai’s assertion in [
40] that the discussion of this problem in [
38] ‘revealed that his approach suits better the formulation of solvable
-symmetric potentials than that in [
5]’ is not precisely accurate—it is the change of variable
that suits better his analysis [
38] compared with the variable
. Namely, if the reflection
→ −
keeps the TP unchanged—the case of our current interest—then one can choose
to be an odd function of x. If all the TP coefficients are required to be real, then the Schwarzian derivative
becomes an even real function of x and the
-transformation is equivalent to the complex conjugation of RefPF (3) followed by the reflection of the argument η.
As another novel development inspired by Lévai’s works [
31,
34,
38,
39], the author can point to our recent idea [
9,
49,
50] to introduce complex (non-self-adjoint) CSLE (1) and then examine its so-called [
36,
51,
52] ‘almost-everywhere holomorphic’ (AEH) solutions
which exist at some energies
inside the vertical band |
Re η| < 1 in the complex plane. It will be proven below that the monomial product
coincides with the monic Jacobi polynomial with generally complex indexes
(It would be more accurate to use the notation
and
, but we disregard the dependence of the latter quantities on the parameters
and
for briefness.) Note that we use the term ‘AEH solutions’, instead of the equivalent epithet ‘q-RSs’ appearing in the section title, to stress that we deal with complex functions analytically continued from the real axis into the complex plane.
We then took advantage of the fact that the so-called [
53,
54] ‘differential polynomial system’ (DPS) composed of complex Jacobi polynomials [
55] allows the second real-field reduction formed by Routh polynomials [
14], in addition to the one formed by conventional (real) Jacobi polynomials.
To derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for CSLE (1) to have an AEH solution (21), first note that characteristic exponents (ChExps) of these solutions for the poles of CSLE (1) at ±1 satisfy the indicial equations
Introducing the complex exponent differences (ExpDiffs)
we come to the equation
Representing RefPF (3) as
where the parameter
is chosen to coincide with the ExpDiff for the pole of the
Ref CSLE at infinity, and examining asymptotic behavior of AEH solutions near this pole, we can write the closing equation for the given system of algebraic equations in
and
as follows:
where
is the ChExp for the pole of CSLE (1) at infinity and
It can be shown that the derived system of algebraic Equations (26), (29)–(31) is simply another representation for coupled Equations (14)–(16) in [
34].
Squaring (31) gives
while substituting (30) into (29) brings us to the following energy dispersion formula:
Rewriting (26) as
where
squaring (32) and making use of (34), we come to the following quartic equation
in
. Note that the leading coefficient of quartic Equation (36) coincides with the TP discriminant
For each of
four generally complex roots of this equation (or for each of three roots if the TP discriminant vanishes [
56]), the corresponding pair of the ExpDiffs
coincides with two roots of the quadratic equation
Expressing again
in terms of
via (34), one finds
Keeping in mind that AEH solutions (21) obey the ODE
with the Bose invariant
and substituting (21) and (23) into (40) then brings us to the ODE
if we set
One can easily verify the latter relation by substituting (7), (25), (26), and (33) into the left-hand side of (43).
We thus proved that q-RSs (21) have the form
and thereby arrived at the starting point of Lévai’s approach [
34,
38,
40,
41] while moving in the opposite direction.
Setting
and also taking into account that, as a direct consequence of (34) and (45),
we come to (10) in [
34] with the Jacobi indexes α and β dependent on the polynomial degree; namely,
in our notation.
The simplification utilized in Lévai’s aforementioned papers takes place in the particular case:
when the parameter
becomes independent of the polynomial degree:
Subtracting one of Equation (34) from another, we come to the crucial relation [
34]
which allows one to combine two separate quartic equations in
into a single quartic equation in
Namely, making use of (31), one finds
so [
34]
and
We can thus rewrite (47) as
Substituting (46) into the right-hand side of this equation gives
which brings us to quartic Equation (13) in [
34]:
The trivial real-field reduction of CSLE (1) obtained by choosing all six parameters
to be real leads to the very special representative of the family of the
Ref potentials [
5,
36] referred to by us as ‘Lévai’s
e-TP potential’. However, as it has been noticed by Lévai himself [
34], there is another family of real CSLEs discovered by Milson [
6] and thereby referred to by us [
45] as ‘Milson’s
e-TP potential’. It is obtained by requiring the parameters
and
to be complex-conjugated while keeping real the parameter
. Both RefPF and density function thus become real when expressed in terms of the new variable
. Lévai’s formalism outlined above made it possible to treat both potentials in the unified matter outlined in
Section 3.
4. Ginocchio Potential as an Overlap of Lévai’s and Milson’s e-TP Potentials
The main purpose of this section is to prove that Lévai’s [
34] and Milson’s [
6]
e-TP reductions of the
Ref and
Ref potentials defined via (80) and (122) overlap along the symmetric potential curves
obtained by setting corresponding asymmetry parameters (92) and (119) to zero:
(assuming that the
RefPF in the right-hand side of (80) is parametrized by the parameters
and
according to (93).) As explained below, this assertion can be considered as the corollary of the following theorem:
Theorem 2. The RCSLEs with evenRef and evenRef Bose invariants constitute two rational realizations of the same Sturm–Liouville problem interrelated via an algebraic change of variable.
Proof of Theorem 2. Let us first prove that the solutions of ODEs (64) and (120) under the boundary conditions (65) and (121), respectively, are interrelated via the following algebraic formulas:
or
if we choose
and
or, in Lévai’s notation,
and
so
and
with
in the notation of
Section 3.1.
If we, following [
45], introduce two nonnegative variables
satisfying the ODEs
then algebraic relation (148) is equivalent to the linear fractional transformation
assuming that the parameters
are interrelated as specified above.
To prove (158), let us introduce the auxiliary PF
and demonstrate that the function
satisfies ODE (157) for the variable
with
Indeed, differentiating (160) with respect to x and making use of (157) with the lower subscript, one finds
where we also took into account that
Under constraints (150) and (151), the denominator of the PF in the right-hand side of (162) can be rewritten as follows:
which gives
This confirms that
as asserted.
Our next step is to prove that the parameters
and
can be interrelated in such a way that
provided that the coefficients of
e-TPs (62) and (63) obey constraints (150)–(153) and therefore, as proven above, the variables
are related via linear fractional transformation (158), so [
65]
This implies that interrelation Formula (167) is equivalent to the requirement that the RefPFs
and
where
are interrelated as follows:
Substituting (93) with
and (115) with
into the right-hand sides of (169) and (170), accordingly, we can represent the RefPFs in question as
and
Expressing the right-hand side of (173) in terms of the variable
, we then rewrite (172) as
and thereby confirm that the right-hand side of the latter formula turns into (174) if we choose [
45]
which concludes the proof. □
It seems beneficiary to also reformulate Theorem 2 as the following proposition:
Corollary 1. The Liouville transformations of the RCSLEs with even Ref and even Ref Bose invariants on the intervals (−1, +1) and (−∞, +∞) accordingly results in the Schrödinger equation with exactly the same potential symmetric under the reflection of its argument x.
This constitutes the main result of this paper.
As illuminated in detail in [
45], the Liouville transformation of the CSLE
on the finite interval (0, 1) converts it to the Schrödinger equation with the non-singular radial
Ref potential. By reflecting the latter potential around the origin, the author [
5] originally constructed the symmetric potential later rediscovered by Ginocchio [
44] in the form
where the variable y is related to the variable
as follows:
It was Wu [
60] who recognized the equivalence of two representations as soon as Ginocchio presented his results.
Later, Lévai [
59] pointed to the fact that the Ginocchio potential on the line turns into the symmetric
Ref potential associated with
e-TP (62) if we choose
and then express (178) in terms of variable (68). Setting
in (84) and also making use of constraint (49) to replace
in (26) for
thus gives
and
respectively. As expected, energy dispersion formula (183) and quadratic equation
match, respectively, (3.9) and (3.10) in [
44], with μ standing for
in our notation. Taking into account that both leading and linear coefficients of the quadratic equation are positive, the latter may have a positive root
iff its free term is negative, i.e., iff
On the other hand, substituting (176) into (118) shows that
so the quadratic polynomial in the brackets in quartic Equation (136) takes the form
Setting side by side quadratic Equations (184) and (188), we conclude that the positive root of the former equation specifies ChExp (132) of the (n + 1)-th eigenfunction for the pole of CSLE (114) at infinity:
provided that
as prescribed by (143) with
.
Finally, comparing (187) with (182), we find that Lévai’s parameters (84) and (118) are related via a nontrivial formula
which confirms our assertion that, despite the
formal similarity between quartic Equations (58) and (125), the two equations are related in a rather complicated fashion in the symmetric limit
.
As already pointed to in the Introduction, the fact that the symmetric reduction of the
Ref potential leads to a certain subclass of the
Ref potentials has been already recognized by Milson [
6], who cited in this connection the quadratic transformation of the hypergeometric function using the substitution
which is reminiscent of (156) for the variable
However, the author was unable to figure out all the details necessary for the suggested (possibly alternative) representation of the Schrödinger equation with the given symmetric potential.
As originally discovered by Ginocchio [
44], the eigenfunctions of the Schrödinger equation with potential (178) can be expressed in terms of classical Gegenbauer polynomials with degree-dependent indexes after being converted to the variable
:
On the other hand, as demonstrated in [
7,
45], the eigenfunctions of
Ref CSLE (114) with real
are expressible in terms of orthogonal Masjed-Jamei polynomials [
46]
with degree-dependent indexes
larger than n + 1.
5. Example: Sech-Squared Potential
Lévai’s [
34] and Milson’s [
6]
e-TP potentials for
and
turn into the Rosen–Morse [
28] and, respectively, Gendenshtein [
30] TSI potentials:
and
where
and
Our choice of the TP coefficients
, and
assures that conditions (150) and (151) automatically hold and, as a result, the variables
and
are related via linear fractional Formula (158).
The corresponding prime SLEs take the form
and
which are solved under the DBCs at ±1 and ±∞, respectively. The representation of the RCSLEs of our interest in the prime form [
37] makes the ChExps of two Frobenius solutions differ only by sign, and therefore the DBC automatically selects the principal solution.
Setting
in (136) brings us to the following quadratic equation
in
, where we changed
for
to indicate that the given equation holds for the averaged indexes of the Jacobi polynomials forming not only the eigenfunctions of CSLE (114), but also any other q-RSs. The crucial feature of this quadratic equation is that its coefficients are independent of the polynomial degree, and therefore, as a direct consequence of (126), this is also true for the complex-conjugated pairs of the Jacobi indexes in question. So, in contrast with RM potential (195), Gendenshtein potential (196) belongs to Group A (not B!) in Odake and Sasaki’s [
66] classification scheme of the rational TSI potentials. This is the direct consequence of our observation [
51] that the ExpDiffs for the poles of SLE (202) at ±∞ are energy-independent, so the TFI CSLE under consideration belongs to Group A [
63]. Since all the q-RSs in this case are specified by a single series of Maya diagrams [
63], all the solvable rational Darboux–Crum transforms of SLE (202) with a complex parameter
can be obtained using admissible Wronskians of Routh polynomials [
67] with the common complex index. It is convenient to choose the sequence which starts from a finite orthogonal set of R–Routh polynomials forming
eigenfunctions of SLE (202). As a result [
66,
67], the corresponding Wronskian transforms of R–Routh polynomials form finite sequences of exceptional orthogonal polynomials (EOSs) in Quesne’s terms [
64].
The symmetric reductions
and
of potentials (195) and (196) represent exactly the same
sech-squared potential if the parameters
and
are related via (176). This potential can be thus quantized either via classical Gegenbauer polynomials with
degree-dependent indexes [
44] or via Masjed-Jamei polynomials [
46] with
degree-independent indexes [
45]. As pointed to in [
63], the A or B grouping suggested by Odake and Sasaki [
66] for rational TSI potentials is actually an attribute of the particular rational realization of the given potential rather than the potential itself. The h-PT and Morse potentials represent two other instances of such an atypical dualism [
63,
68].
The latter quantization scheme using R–Routh polynomials of a definite parity is obviously preferable for constructing the symmetric Darboux–Crum transforms of the
sech-squared potential [
66]. Since it is the symmetric limit of the Gendenshtein potential, the q-RSs of a definite parity in this limiting case are also specified by a single series of Maya diagrams, and therefore all the rational Darboux–Crum transforms (RDC
) of SLE (202) with a real parameter
can be obtained using admissible Wronskians of Routh polynomials of a definite parity with the common real index such that the first
polynomials in the given infinite polynomial sequence constitute a finite orthogonal set of Masjed-Jamei polynomials. As a result, the corresponding Wronskian transforms of Masjed-Jamei polynomials must form finite sequences of EOPs. A detailed study on this remarkable family of finite EOP sequences is currently under way.