Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-course-of-the-year-4-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2015/paper-1/section-a/a2/solution

The hard wall imposes , while the increasing linear potential requires decay as . Set
The stationary Schrödinger equation becomes . The growing Airy function solution is excluded, leaving
This is the quantum bouncer. For the first four states, . Their interior node counts are respectively zero, one, two and three. Each wavefunction starts at zero at the wall, oscillates in the classically allowed interval, and crosses smoothly into an exponentially decaying tail beyond the turning point . The turning point is not an extra hard wall: the wavefunction generally remains nonzero there and beyond it.
Figure 1.
The first four quantum-bouncer wavefunctions and their classical turning points
. Original normalized Airy-function calculation. The vertical dashed lines mark where the potential equals each energy; the decaying tail is retained. Details.

New to topics? Read the docs here!