Class of 2019 physics major, Michael Rushka, publishes a second paper based on his thesis work

Undergraduate Michael Rushka just had the second half of his thesis published in the Journal of Mathematical Physics. The article, entitled “Converting translation operators into plane polar and spherical coordinates and their use in determining quantum-mechanical wavefunctions in a representation-independent fashion” discusses a novel method to compute wavefunctions using operator methods rather than using differential equations. This paper applied these techniques to the Coulomb problem in two and three dimensions. It is the second paper in this theme, the first one exploring the wavefunction of the simple harmonic oscillator along similar lines of reasoning (and published in the American Journal of Physics). Mike won the 2019 Physics Department Research Award for his thesis. The article can be found at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0021013