From isolated singular wells to exact Bloch bands: the trigonometric Pöschl-Teller lattice
An exactly solvable lattice with periodic inverse-square singularities exhibits two physically distinct mechanisms of spectral-gap closure. The model arises from the generalized trigonometric Pöschl-Teller potential in the coupling range where both local solutions at each singularity are square-integrable. A transmitting, current-preserving self-adjoint matching condition connects neighboring cells and generates a nontrivial Bloch spectrum. For a generic lattice with two inequivalent singular sublattices, the spectrum contains two alternating families of gaps, and the band edges reproduce the scale-invariant spectra of the associated finite singular system. One gap family closes when the two sublattices become equivalent. In this symmetric limit, however, the primitive period halves, so the apparent band crossing results from Brillouin-zone folding. A different family closes at a critical but genuinely asymmetric configuration. Because the primitive period is preserved, adjacent bands then meet at the center of the original Brillouin zone in a genuine massless Dirac-like cone. Near either critical limit, a small finite gap acts as an effective Dirac mass: the dispersion remains quadratic near a band edge but crosses over to a massive Dirac-like form beyond that narrow region. The band curvatures define effective electron and hole masses. Exact Bloch eigenfunctions further reveal that isospectral lattices can display different single-particle probability densities. This model therefore provides an analytically controlled one-dimensional setting in which conventional quadratic carriers, massive Dirac-like band dispersions, and a tunable massless contact coexist within the same singular lattice.