Colloquium: June 30, 2026 (14:00, room 614). Speaker: Eyal Subag (Bar-Ilan). Title: “A new model for the quantum mechanics of the hydrogen atom”.
The energy spectrum of the hydrogen atom is one of the oldest computations in quantum mechanics, yet in the usual model the Schrodinger operator is singular, non-canonical, and relies on unmotivated boundary conditions. In joint work with Joseph Bernstein, we give a fully algebraic alternative: the configuration space becomes a light cone in a four-dimensional Lorentzian space, the Schrodinger operator is an algebraic differential operator on that cone, and the spectral problem reduces to the representation theory of SL2(R). From this we recover the known spectrum and its physical solutions. The talk will be accessible and focus on the physical four-dimensional case.
