Quantum–classical correspondence for a particle in a homogeneous field

The correspondence principle provides a prescription to connect quantum physics to classical. It asserts that the physical quantities evaluated quantum mechanically approach their respective classical values for large quantum numbers. This has been shown for the pedagogically important cases of the particle in a box and a harmonic oscillator. However, a particle in a constant field has a wave function related to the Airy function and has at best been treated numerically. Employing energy eigenstates we obtain the expectation values of the position, the momentum and their moments upto fourth order, rigorously and without resorting to numerical or graphical techniques. We compare them with the corresponding classical values. We also examine the uncertainty product for the system. (paper)