Narrow Results

A systematic procedure to study one-dimensional Schrödinger equation with a position-dependent effective mass (PDEM) in the kinetic energy operator is explored. The conventional free-particle problem reveals a new and interesting situation in that, in the presence of a mass background, formation of bound states is signalled. We also discuss coordinate-transformed, constant-mass Schrödinger equation, its matching with the PDEM form and the consequent decoupling of the ambiguity parameters. This provides a unified approach to many exact results known in the literature, as well as to a lot of new ones.

We provide some explicit examples wherein the Schrödinger equation for the Morse potential remains exactly solvable in a position-dependent mass background. Furthermore, we show how in such a context, the map from the full line (-∞, ∞) to the half-line (0, ∞) may convert an exactly solvable Morse potential into an exactly solvable Coulomb one. This generalizes a well-known property of constant-mass problems.