The hypergeometric function has allowed the development of “solvable” models for one-dimensional quantum scattering through and over barriers (Eckart (1930), Bhattacharjie and Sudarshan (1962)), and generalized to include position-dependent effective masses (Dekar et al. (1999)).

More varied applications include photon scattering from atoms (Gavrila (1967)), energy distributions of particles in plasmas (Mace and Hellberg (1995)), conformal field theory of critical phenomena (Burkhardt and Xue (1991)), quantum chromo-dynamics (Atkinson and Johnson (1988)), and general parametrization of the effective potentials of interaction between atoms in diatomic molecules (Herrick and O’Connor (1998)).