Termination of the Coulomb radial series
ID: termination-of-the-coulomb-radial-series
For a negative Coulomb energy, remove the exponential decay and regular radial power to obtain a confluent-hypergeometric series. Its recurrence terminates only when , with a nonnegative integer. Regularity at the origin and normalizability at infinity then give the hydrogenic energy levels. Without those physical boundary conditions the radial differential equation has other solutions.
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