The total angular momentum operator is . Since orbital and spin operators act on different factors of the tensor product, they commute, and expanding gives
A coupled angular momentum eigenstate is a simultaneous eigenstate of these three squared operators, with eigenvalues , and . Thus the angular factor in the spin-orbit interaction is the number
The other factor, , is radial. It commutes with the angular operators, and a central-potential energy eigenstate separates into a radial wavefunction and an angular spinor. Taking its radial expectation value therefore gives
This spin-orbit energy shift in a central potential is independent of , so rotational symmetry preserves the magnetic degeneracy within a fixed multiplet. It is a first-order fine structure correction; the given coefficient already includes the relativistic factor needed for the electron's spin-orbit coupling.
The attractive Coulomb potential energy is , so
Use precisely the radial normalization stated in the PDF: the radial probability measure is . The supplied function has
Its integral is one, since . In particular,
This calculation uses the supplied convention, rather than multiplying a separately normalized standard radial function by an extra .
The addition of angular momentum bracket is . Substitution in the spin-orbit energy shift in a central potential therefore gives
Here is the supplied Bohr radius. The negative sign means the member of the pair is shifted downward by this spin-orbit interaction; it is not the total hydrogen binding energy.
For the isotropic three-dimensional quantum harmonic oscillator, , hence is constant. No radial integral remains, so the spin-orbit energy shift in a central potential reduces to
For , the only possibility is , and the bracket vanishes. For , coupling to spin one-half permits and , whose brackets are and . Thus
These spin-orbit shifts of an isotropic harmonic oscillator are a zero line, a downward parabola, and an upward parabola of half the downward magnitude. They are independent of the radial excitation number, and their magnetic multiplicities are respectively two, two and four. Their weighted mean within the manifold is zero: .
Figure 1.
Harmonic-oscillator spin-orbit shifts grow quadratically with trap frequency
. Original plot with an arbitrary reference frequency and energy unit . Only the spin-orbit interaction shifts are shown, not the unperturbed oscillator energies. The perturbative nonrelativistic regime requires these shifts to remain small relative to the orbital spacings. Details.
For an isotropic three-dimensional quantum harmonic oscillator, makes . The spin-orbit energy shift in a central potential is therefore independent of the radial excitation. For spin one-half, the shift is zero, while the two shifts are for and for .
These shifts are quadratic in trap frequency. Their degeneracy-weighted sum in the manifold is zero, since the multiplicities are two and four. They are perturbative corrections rather than full oscillator energies; a nonrelativistic treatment requires them to be small compared with the orbital spacings.