Confinement of atoms with Robin’s condition: Spontaneous symmetry breaking

Abstract

The properties of the ground state of the hydrogen atom in a spherical vacuum cavity with general boundary “not going out” conditions (i.e., when the probability current through the boundary vanishes) are studied. It is shown that in contrast to the confinement of an atom by a potential barrier, in this case depending on the parameters of the cavity, the atom could be in stable equilibrium at the center of the cavity or shift towards its periphery: spontaneous breaking of spherical symmetry occurs. The phase diagram of the shift and the dependence of the shift value and the binding energy of the ground state of the atom on the cavity parameters are presented. At the same time, the deformation properties of the electron wave function (WF) for an asymmetric distortion are so nontrivial that a non-zero shift occurs even when an electron is repulsed from the cavity boundary.