Numerical Computation of Critical Binding Parameters of Screened Coulomb Potentials

For nearly a century screened Coulomb potentials have been of recognized importance in diverse areas of physics and chemistry. A key feature of interest in these potentials is the phenomenon of critical screening. This paper has three main purposes: To present an extensive, open-access, high accuracy (60 digit) benchmark reference data set of critical screening parameters, with validation; to confirm excellent past work in the field (to 30 digits), and to correct an historical oversight in its literature; and to present the essentials of our new approach, the “Phase Method” (PM), for computing them. Using the PM we calculate critical screening parameters, accurate to 60 decimal digits, for the Yukawa/Debye, Hulthén, Pseudo-Hulthén, and Exponential Cosine Screened Coulomb (ECSC)) potentials. The practical feasibility of such calculations on inexpensive hardware opens up new possibilities in research and education. We highlight an apparently overlooked 1989 paper of Demiralp on critical screening parameters of the Yukawa potential, which accurately calculated them to 30 decimal digits. Our main results are computations of the critical screening parameters µ_c= 1/D_c for screening lengths D ≤ 1000 au and angular momenta l = 0 . . . 20. The claimed accuracy of our results is supported by several independent lines of evidence: comparison with the most accurate (30 digit) values available in the print literature for the Yukawa, Hulthén, and ECSC potentials; comparison to 60 decimal digits accuracy with exactly known eigenvalues and critical binding parameters of the Pseudo-Hulthén potential; consistency tests between computed critical parameters, for various l-values for the Pseudo-Hulthén Potential, and known exact relations between eigenvalues; and application of a novel consistency test between results with different potential parameters, that exploits an exact scaling symmetry of this entire class of potentials. Similar calculations were done for ECSC and Yukawa potentials for screening lengths up to D ≤ 10⁵ and l ≤ 12, to 30 digit accuracy, which show interesting (and to our knowledge not previously reported) periodic structure in D_c(n, l) for the ECSC potential that is not observed for the Yukawa potential. The asymptotic scaling behavior for the Yukawa and Hulthén potentials is explained quantitatively by simple semiclassical calculations.