Animations of solutions to the Schrodinger equation

Stationary states of particles in a box

Now let's look at wavefunctions that describe a particle in a box. The first stationary state looks like this:

As before, the top plot shows the real part, imaginary part, and absolute value as separate curves. The bottom plot shows the complex wavefunction in a single plot.

Here are the same plots for the second stationary state

Note that the absolute value of the wavefunction doesn't change in each of these solutions. That's why they're called stationary states.

On the next page, we'll see some non-stationary solutions.