1) Follow the instructions in Example 5-10 in loading the software
(access the program, by looking on the computers in the back lab under Start, Programs, Modern Physics, Microsoft Multiplan)

2) Use the default settings for box height and width.
what values did you record about your box?  did you record appropriate units for each?  do you understand the units being used, compared to "normal" units?  convince me...

3) Find, by experimentation, the lowest 4 energy levels to 3 significant figures.

a) how do you know when you have a solution?  [i.e., what can you say about your wavefunction?
or conversely, how do you know (from visual inspection of your trial wavefunction) when you don't have a viable solution for the wavefunction?]

b) by what process does the program find a solution for  y  ?  (in the particle-in-the-infinite-box solution that we did in class, we found 2 things --  y  and E .  is that what's going on here?)

c) surely you created a table listing the quantum number n and the corresponding energy; how does one recognize the wavefunction for the nth state?

4) One of the main things that we wanted to know about the energy solutions (called energy eigenstates) of this box is how they compared to the corresponding energy solutions to the particle-in-the-infinite-box)... you should now be able to answer the question of how lowering the walls of the box affects the energy eigenstates: perhaps you should find the ratio of each bound state Energy to that of the ground state... did you include a column in your previous table for the corresponding particle-in-the-infinite-box energies?  i'm sure that you did...

5) for each of the eigenstates 1 < n < 4, describe the wavefunction function in the 3 regions

    a) - infinity < x < -L
    b)        - L < x < L
    c)           L < x <  infinity

are they linear, quadratic, sin/cos, exponential, constant, ???

6) what is it about the relationship of the potential energy value to the total energy value that apparently decides the kind of function  y  is?

7) what happens (to the wavefunction) when you try an find the 5th energy state?  why are the functions in all parts of the box oscillating trig functions?

8) for the 5th energy state, how is the oscillation inside the box different from outside the box?

9) you should be able to tie the answer to question 8 back to some physics that we already read and discussed in chapter 5

10) having now seen the solutions (y and E) for the infinite box and the finite box, what lessions/conclusions etc can you make about what happens when you lower the walls of the box