A comparative study of transition oscillator strengths and static polarizabilities of the hydrogen atom confined in Gaussian potential

The multipole (dipole, quadrupole, and octopole) photon-absorption transition oscillator strengths for the ground state of hydrogen atom confined in Gaussian potential are investigated for a great variety of potential depths and confining radii. It is interestingly found that at fixed potential depth the gradual increase of confining radius shows first destructive and then constructive effect on the multipole oscillator strengths. Such an effect can be understood from the overlap between the initial and final states. Multipole polarizabilities of the system are obtained through the sum-over-states formalism where the contributions from both the bound and continuum spectra of the system are included. Although the separate bound and continuum contributions can not be determined accurately, due to the long-range nature of the Coulomb potential introduced by the nucleus, their summations can be obtained to reasonably good accuracy, leading to fast convergence of numerical calculations of multipole polarizabilities. The present results are compared with previous calculations available in the literature. Although good agreement is observed for the dipole polarizability, significant differences exist in the quadrupole polarizability and orders-of-magnitude differences appear in the octopole polarizability. The possible reason for such large differences is analyzed by comparing the sum rule of corresponding oscillator strengths.