Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics
Accurate quantum and statistical mechanics from system-specific operator expansions
Alexander N. Drozdov, J. Javier Brey
Abstract
An effective and flexible numerical scheme is proposed to calculate the quantum and statistical mechanics of multidimensional systems in a simple economic way. The basic idea is to split the Hamiltonian operator into a reference separable part, whose solution can be obtained by a combination of analytic and numerical techniques, and a term containing nonseparable interactions and then to employ a symmetric decomposition of the time evolution operator, which is exact up to a high order in the time step. The method is applicable to a wide range of coupling potentials and requires numerical effort that scales only linearly with the number of degrees of freedom involved. To verify the utility of the present approach, two model systems with strongly anharmonic mode coupling are considered. The applications show that the method accurately describes the dynamics for fairly long times with moderate coupling strengths and is still much less arduous than a general numerically exact calculation.