The path integral was created to quantize systems whose dynamics are nonlocal in time and for which a Hamiltonian formulation could not be found. In this article we quantize a linear oscillator with an interaction that depends on the oscillator’s position at past and future times. The central issue is the classical boundary value problem for such an oscillator. Because two-time functional boundary conditions are used to implement the quantization, we take up related questions, such as causality in this context, and the general issue of stability for forward and inward data specifications.
Background: Time-dependent density functional theory is widely used to describe excitations of many-fermion systems. In its many applications, three-dimensional (3D) coordinate-space representation is used, and infinite-domain calculations are limited to a finite volume represented by a spatial box. For finite quantum systems (atoms, molecules, nuclei, hadrons), the commonly used periodic or reflecting boundary conditions introduce spurious quantization of the continuum states and artificial reflections from boundary; hence, an incorrect treatment of evaporated particles.Purpose: The finite-volume artifacts for finite systems can be practically cured by invoking an absorbing potential in a certain boundary region sufficiently far from the described system. However, such absorption cannot be applied in the calculations of infinite matter (crystal electrons, quantum fluids, neutron star crust), which suffer from unphysical effects stemming from a finite computational box used. Here, twist-averaged boundary conditions (TABC) have been used successfully to diminish the finite-volume effects. In this work, we extend TABC to time-dependent modes.Method: We use the 3D time-dependent density functional framework with the Skyrme energy density functional. The practical calculations are carried out for small- and large-amplitude electric dipole and quadrupole oscillations of
16O. We apply and compare three kinds of boundary conditions: periodic, absorbing, and twist-averaged.Results: Calculations employing absorbing boundary conditions (ABC) and TABC are superior to those based on periodic boundary conditions. For low-energy excitations, TABC and ABC variants yield very similar results. With only four twist phases per spatial direction in TABC, one obtains an excellent reduction of spurious fluctuations. In the nonlinear regime, one has to deal with evaporated particles. In TABC, the floating nucleon gas remains in the box; the amount of nucleons in the gas is found to be roughly the same as the number of absorbed particles in ABC.Conclusion: We demonstrate that by using TABC, one can reduce finite-volume effects drastically without adding any additional parameters associated with absorption at large distances. Moreover, TABC are an obvious choice for time-dependent calculations for infinite systems. Since TABC calculations for different twists can be performed independently, the method is trivially adapted to parallel computing.
The generalized Bethe ansatz framework formulated in [P. R. Pasnoori, Phys. Rev. B 112, L060409 (2025)] provides a unified framework to find exact solutions to quantum many-body systems with time-dependent coupling strengths with periodic boundary conditions. In this work we extend this framework to the case of open boundary conditions where in addition to the time-dependent interactions in the bulk, the boundary conditions are explicitly time-dependent. We show that for integrable time-dependent bulk coupling strengths, the generalized Bethe ansatz framework provides the time-dependent boundary conditions compatible with integrability and reduces the time-dependent Schrodinger equation to a set of matrix difference equations called the boundary quantum Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov (BqKZ) equations. The solution to the BqKZ equations provides the explicit form of the exact wavefunction. We further show that the RG invariants of the corresponding static model identify with the dynamical invariants in the time-dependent model.