We present an alternative time-dependent method of calculating the S matrix in quantum systems governed by a Hamiltonian. In the first step one constructs a new Hamiltonian that describes the physics of scattering at energy E with a reduced number of degrees of freedom. Its matrix elements are computed with a Monte Carlo projector method. In the second step the scattering matrix is computed algebraically via diagonalization and exponentiation of the new Hamiltonian. Although we have in mind applications in many-body systems and quantum field theory, the method should be applicable and useful in such diverse areas as atomic and molecular physics, nuclear physics, high-energy physics and solid-state physics. As an illustration of the method, we compute s-wave scattering of two nucleons in a nonrelativistic potential model (Yamaguchi potential), for which the S matrix is known exactly.
We present an alternative time-dependent method of calculating the S matrix in quantum systems governed by a Hamiltonian. In the first step one constructs a new Hamiltonian that describes the physics of scattering at energy E with a reduced number of degrees of freedom. Its matrix elements are computed with a Monte Carlo projector method. In the second step the scattering matrix is computed algebraically via diagonalization and exponentiation of the new Hamiltonian. Although we have in mind applications in many-body systems and quantum field theory, the method should be applicable and useful in such diverse areas as atomic and molecular physics, nuclear physics, high-energy physics and solid-state physics. As an illustration of the method, we compute s-wave scattering of two nucleons in a nonrelativistic potential model (Yamaguchi potential), for which the S matrix is known exactly.
We construct an eigenvalue problem by confining many-body system to a bounded domain with the boundary condition that the wave function vanishes. By changing the boundary, however, the eigenvalues of the energy can be varied continuously. The D-matrix is defined for a series of bounded problems with the same value for the ground state energy. The D-matrix is related to the S-matrix, enabling us to calculate the S-matrix at a given energy. The Schrodinger equation for the system is transformed to a diffusion equation by regarding time as imaginary. Initial ensemble, representing an approximate wave function, is evolved, through Monte Carlo simulation of random walks and branching, to the ground state ensemble. The limitations of investigation are: 1. Ingoing and outgoing channels have two fragments. 2. The interaction between the fragments is negligible outside the boundary mentioned above. 3. The particles are bosons or we know the zeros of the wave function. First we consider the scattering of a particle by a potential, which is equivalent to the two-body problem, in one dimension. Here we use the Poschl-Teller potential for which the exact solution is known. We use this case to investigate a new sampling method and study of various parameters. Next we consider three particles in one dimension. Here we take interaction to be a potential well, where at least one of the interactions is attractive so that a two-body bound state is possible.
… as suggested by Fermi, the time-independent Schrödinger equation … can be interpreted as describing the behavior of a system of particles each of which performs a random walk, i.e., diffuses isotropically and at the same time is subject to multiplication, which is determined by the value of the point function V. N. Metropolis and S. Ulam, 1949 Summary In the projector quantum Monte Carlo method, one uses a function of the hamiltonian to sample a distribution proportional to the exact ground-state wavefunction, and thereby computes exact matrix elements of it. An importance sampling transformation makes the algorithm much more efficient. In this chapter we introduce and develop the diffusion Monte Carlo method, which involves drifting, branching random walks. For any excited state, including any system with more than two electrons, one encounters the sign problem, limiting the direct application of these algorithms for most fermion systems. Instead, by using approximate fixed-node or fixed-phase boundary conditions, one can achieve efficiency similar to variational Monte Carlo. We also discuss the application of the projector method in a basis of Slater determinants. In this chapter, we discuss a different quantum Monte Carlo method, projector Monte Carlo (PMC). This general method was first suggested by Fermi [1049]; see the quote at the start of this chapter by two of the inventors of the Monte Carlo method. An implementation of PMC was tried out in the early days of computing [1050]. Advances in methodology, in particular importance sampling, resulted in a significant large-scale application: the exact calculation of the ground-state properties of 256 hard-sphere bosons by Kalos, Levesque, and Verlet [1051] in 1974. Calculations for electronic systems and the fixednode approximation were introduced by Anderson [1052, 1053]. One of the most important projector MC algorithms, the diffusion Monte Carlo algorithm with importance sampling for fermions, was used to compute the correlation energy of homogeneous electron gas by Ceperley and Alder [109] in 1980; the resulting HEG correlation energy was crucial in the development of density functional calculations. Types and properties of projectors In this method, a many-body projector G ( R , R ) = Ĝ is repeatedly applied to filter out the exact many-body ground state from an initial state; the operation of the projector is carried out with a random walk, hence the name of this class of methods.
A nonperturbative method is developed for calculating the excitation of a many-body system by a time-dependent Hamiltonian. The stationary-phase approximation to a functional-integral representation of the interaction-picture many-body evolution operator results in a mean-field approximation to the S matrix which is asymptotically time independent. A one-body temporally nonlocal evolution equation defines the stationary mean-field configurations. The general method and character of the stationary solutions are illustrated by application to the forced harmonic oscillator and forced Lipkin model. Potential applications to realistic nuclear and atomic scattering situations are discussed.NUCLEAR REACTIONS Mean-field approximation, many-body S matrix, time-dependent Hartree Fock.
Almost any of the great textbooks available on scattering theory continues to explain how a collision experiment measures scattering cross sections for different events, and relates the relevant S-matrix elements, or the scattering amplitudes (onshell T-matrix), to those cross sections. We highly recommend Taylor’s book in this respect. In this volume and the volume that will follow, however, our motivation does not lie in (although discussions can be extended to) the theoretical description of collision experiments. We are mostly interested in applications of scattering theory in few-body physics and effective interactions in few- and many-body physics. Therefore, we consider a method that is having huge success in the theoretical and numerical description of collisions in nuclear physics and quantum chromodynamics, as well as ultracold atomic and condensed matter physics recently. The method allows for an estimation of low-energy scattering parameters and binding energies from exact diagonalisation, in the low-energy sector, of the system’s Hamiltonian, and is originally due to Lüscher [2]. Lacking another term for it, we have decided to simply label this and related methods ‘modern scattering theory’.
The shell model provides a powerful framework for nuclear structure calculations. The nucleons beyond an inert magic core are confined in a valence shell and interact through an effective two-body potential generally determined from the G-matrix method. However, the applicability of the shell model remains limited by the exponential growth of the many-body space with the number of valence nucleons and with the size of the one-body space. The quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods may thus be considered as a potentially attractive alternative to the direct diagonalization of the Hamiltonian matrix. The many-body problem is indeed reduced to a set of stochastic one-body problems describing independent particles in a fluctuating external field. Up to date, the QMC approaches of the shell model lead to the ground-state and the thermodynamic properties, but a detailed spectroscopy of nuclei is not reachable. Furthermore, they suffer from a common pathology of fermionic QMC methods, namely the sign/phase problem, which strongly contaminates the convergence of the calculation. In this context, we will present a new QMC method, providing the "yrast spectroscopy" of nuclei, and in which the sign/phase problem is managed through the constrained path approximation that is widely used in the ab initio nuclear calculations and in condensed matter physics.