Heisenberg's uncertainty relations for a hydrogen atom confined by an impenetrable spherical cavity

The incompatibility between two observables in quantum theory is described by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In this work, we study spatial confinement effects on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for a hydrogen atom located at the center of an impenetrable spherical cavity with radius r(o). Both the radial and vector representation of the uncertainty principle are considered. For this, we solve the Schrodinger equation numerically within a finite-differences approach. We find that for small cavity sizes the values of Delta(r) over cap Delta(p) over cap (r) (radial) bunch according to the number of nodes and that for Rydberg states, i.e., large excitation, they become more coherent, satisfying exactly Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, in contrast to the vector description. However, for the vector case, we find that Delta(r) over cap degenerates for small cavity sizes and bunches according to the principal quantum number n for large cavities. We find that the behavior of Delta(p) over cap is responsible for the breaking of the energy degeneracy for confined quantum systems. This occurs when the confinement radius is of the order of the orbital size, as determined by the electron average distance <(r) over cap >. In addition, we estimate the critical cavity size for which relativistic effects become relevant and verify that the relativistic corrections to the energy, obtained from first-order perturbation theory, become important when the total energy of the atom surpasses 93.845 Hartree, corresponding to 10% of the speed of light, which is fulfilled for cavity sizes r(o)<1 a.u