We propose a method of solution of the many-body Schr\"odinger equation that involves an expansion of the wave function in terms of a finite, time-dependent basis of a relevant subspace. The equations of motion for the expansion coefficients generalize previous proposals of approximate dynamics. The method is illustrated in the case of an N-particle system with an SU(2) Hamiltonian, and it is shown that it improves the approximation that disregards off-diagonal elements of the dynamical matrices.
We propose a method of solution of the many-body Schr"odinger equation that involves an expansion of the wave function in terms of a finite, time-dependent basis of a relevant subspace. The equations of motion for the expansion coefficients generalize previous proposals of approximate dynamics. The method is illustrated in the case of an N-particle system with an SU(2) Hamiltonian, and it is shown that it improves the approximation that disregards off-diagonal elements of the dynamical matrices.
We outline a method based on successive canonical transformations which yields a product expansion for the evolution operator of a general (possibly non-Hermitian) Hamiltonian. For a class of such Hamiltonians this expansion involves a finite number of terms, and our method gives the exact solution of the corresponding time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We apply this method to study the dynamics of a general nondegenerate two-level quantum system, a time-dependent classical harmonic oscillator, and a degenerate system consisting of a spin 1 particle interacting with a time-dependent electric field E⃗(t) through the Stark Hamiltonian H=λ(J⃗⋅E⃗)2.
A method of solving the Schrödinger equation based on the use of constant particle-particle interaction potential surfaces (IPS) is proposed. The many-body wave function is presented in a configuration interaction form, with coefficients depending on the total interaction potential. The corresponding set of linear ordinary differential equations for the coefficients was developed. To reduce the computational work, a hierarchy of approximations based on interaction potential surfaces of a part of the particle system was worked out. The solution of a simple exactly solvable model and He-like ions proves that this method is more accurate than the conventional configuration interaction method and demonstrates a better convergence with a basis set increase.
We analyze the many-particle Schrodinger equation for fermions in a thermal ensemble by introducing an exponential operator expansion, defined in the context of thermofield dynamics. The expansion is optimized variationally at each time step through changes in the basis of excitations, which leads to a method of generating approximate differential equations to solve the time dependent problem, and can also be used to cool the system in imaginary time. The method is applied for a specific set of basis transformations and truncation scheme, leading to an explicit set of differential equations that reduce to the Hartree Fock solution in the low temperature limit. This procedure can also be generalized to include quantum correlation, which will be pursued in a future publication.
We propose an algorithm for the numerical solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation for N >> 1bosons interacting via a two-body interaction potential in the mean-field scaling regime. Unlike existing numerical algorithms for quantum dynamics, the proposed algorithm has a computational complexity that is independent of the number N of particles. It is based on an ansatz for the wave function inspired by the Bogoliubov theory, which is an asymptotic theory for large N. In a first part, we follow Bogoliubov theory in evolving the condensate function by the Hartree equation, but we use the Dirac--Frenkel time-dependent variational principle to derive nonlinear equations of motion for the excitation functions in the Bogoliubov ansatz. By carefully exploiting the bosonic symmetry, the so obtained approximate wave functions are shown to have derivatives bounded independently of N apart from a time-dependent global phase factor which rotates with a frequency proportional to N. In the second part, we numerically approximate the wave function (modulo the phase) by a composite algorithm, which employs an appropriate splitting of the equations of motion and uses a dynamical low-rank approximation of the fundamental two-particle excitation function by linear combinations of products of single-particle functions. The low-rank excitation function is evolved in time by a basis update and Galerkin (BUG) integrator that is robust to small singular values of the coefficient matrix and allows for rank adaptivity. Numerical results are provided to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm.
A perturbation treatment is presented for the operator u(t) giving the evolution of the state vector of a system of N particles coupled by 2-body forces. The total Hamiltonian is divided into a diagonal part H0 and off-diagonal part H1 in the representation with N-particle plane-wave states as basis. An effective pair-interaction operator H1 is defined which includes "vertex" corrections of all orders, and the off-diagonal part of u is expressed exactly by an expansion which involves only H1 and the exact diagonal part of u. A closed set of equations determining H1 and the diagonal part of u are obtained by retaining only the leading terms in the expansion. These equations include all the corrections included in the Brueckner approximation and, in addition, they contain 3-body effects, iterated to all orders, which are omitted in that approximation. No one-to-one correspondence between the eigenstates of H0 and those of the total Hamiltonian is appealed to, and the ground state plays no special role. The connection with statistical mechanics follows the fact that the partition function is $\mathrm{Tr}[u(\ensuremath{-}\frac{i}{\mathrm{kT}})]$. The theory simplifies greatly for very large N.
The Bogoliubov method for the excitation spectrum of a Bose-condensed gas is generalized to apply to a gas with an exact large number N of particles. This generalization yields a description of the Schr\"odinger picture field operators as the product of an annihilation operator A for the total number of particles and the sum of a ``condensate wave function'' $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x})$ and a phonon field operator $\ensuremath{\chi}(\mathbf{x})$ in the form $\ensuremath{\psi}(\mathbf{x})\ensuremath{\approx}A{\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x})+\ensuremath{\chi}(\mathbf{x})/\sqrt{N}}$ when the field operator acts on the N particle subspace. It is then possible to expand the Hamiltonian in decreasing powers of N, and thus obtain solutions for eigenvalues and eigenstates as an asymptotic expansion of the same kind. It is also possible to compute all matrix elements of field operators between states of different N. The excitation spectrum can be obtained by essentially the same method as Bogoliubov only if $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x})$ is a solution of the time-independent Gross-Pitaevskii equation for N particles and any chemical potential $\ensuremath{\mu}$, which yields a valid and stable solution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The treatment within a subspace of fixed N is identical in form to that usually used, but the interpretation of the operators is slightly different. A time-dependent generalization is then made, yielding an asymptotic expansion in decreasing powers of N for the equations of motion. In this expansion the condensate wave function has the time-dependent form $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x},t)$, and the condition for the validity of the expansion is that $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x},t)$ satisfies the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation $\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\xi}/\ensuremath{\partial}t=\ensuremath{-}({\ensuremath{\Elzxh}}^{2}/2m){\ensuremath{\nabla}}^{2}\ensuremath{\xi}+V\ensuremath{\xi}+Nu|\ensuremath{\xi}{|}^{2}\ensuremath{\xi}$. The physics is then described in a kind of interaction picture, called the condensate picture, in which the phonon operator can be expressed as $\ensuremath{\chi}(\mathbf{x},t)={\ensuremath{\sum}}_{k}{\ensuremath{\xi}}_{k}(\mathbf{x},t){\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{k},$ where the operators ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{k}$ are time-independent annihilation operators, and the state vector has a time evolution described by a Schr\"odinger equation in which the Hamiltonian is a time-dependent quadratic form in the phonon creation and annihilation operators, whose coefficients are explicitly determined in terms of the time-dependent condensate wave function $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x},t)$.