An Explicit Numerical Scheme for Milne’s Phase–Amplitude Equations

We present an explicit numerical method to solve Milne’s phase–amplitude equations. Existing methods directly solve Milne’s nonlinear equation for amplitude. For that reason, they exhibit high sensitivity to errors and are prone to instability through the growth of a spurious, rapidly varying component of the amplitude. This makes the systematic use of these methods difficult. On the contrary, the present method is based on solving a linear third-order equation which is equivalent to the nonlinear amplitude equation. This linear equation was derived by Kiyokawa, who used it to obtain analytical results on Coulomb wavefunctions. The present method uses this linear equation for numerical computation, thus resolving the problem of the growth of a rapidly varying component.