Recently, general point interactions in one dimension has been used to model a large number of different phenomena in quantum mechanics. Such potentials, however, require some sort of regularization to lead to meaningful results. The usual ways to do so rely on technicalities that may hide important physical aspects of the problem. In this work we present a method to calculate the exact Green functions for general point interactions in one dimension. Our approach differs from previous ones because it is based only on physical quantities, namely, the scattering coefficients R and T to construct G. Renormalization or particular mathematical prescriptions are not invoked. The simple formulation of the method makes it easy to extend to more general contexts, such as for lattices of N general point interactions, on a line, on a half-line, under periodic boundary conditions, and confined in a box.

• Received 23 August 2002

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.66.062712