Describing Molecules in Motion by Quantum Many-Body Methods

Axel U. J. Lode, Camille Lévêque, Lars Bojer Madsen +2 more

In this Colloquium, the wavefunction-based Multiconfigurational Time-Dependent Hartree approaches to the dynamics of indistinguishable particles (MCTDH-F for Fermions and MCTDH-B for Bosons) are reviewed. MCTDH-B and MCTDH-F or, together, MCTDH-X are methods for describing correlated quantum systems of identical particles by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation from first principles. MCTDH-X is used to accurately model the dynamics of real-world quantum many-body systems in atomic, molecular, and optical physics. The key feature of these approaches is the time-dependence and optimization of the single-particle states employed for the construction of a many-body basis set, which yields nonlinear working equations. We briefly describe the historical developments that have lead to the formulation of the MCTDH-X methods and motivate the necessity for wavefunction-based approaches. We sketch the derivation of the unified MCTDH-F and MCTDH-B equations of motion for complete and also specific restricted configuration spaces. The strengths and limitations of the MCTDH-X approach are assessed via benchmarks against an exactly solvable model and via convergence checks. We highlight some applications to instructive and experimentally-realized quantum many-body systems: the dynamics of atoms in Bose-Einstein condensates in magneto-optical and optical traps and of electrons in atoms and molecules. We discuss the current development and frontiers in the field of MCTDH-X: theories and numerical methods for indistinguishable particles, for mixtures of multiple species of indistinguishable particles, the inclusion of nuclear motion for the nonadia-batic dynamics of atomic and molecular systems, the so-called multilayer generalizations to the MCTDH-F and MCTDH-B methods, and the time-dependent orbital-adaptive coupled cluster theory are discussed.

Vladimir S. Melezhik

We have developed a method for treating different quantum few-body dynamics without traditional partial-wave analysis. The key element of the method is a nondirect product discrete variable representation (npDVR) we have suggested and developed in application to the time-dependent mutidimensional Schrödinger equations. It happened that this approach was very efficient in quantitative analysis of low-dimensional ultracold few-body systems arising in confined geometry of atomic traps. As an example, we consider the numerical analysis of the four-dimensional Schrödinger equation describing the resonant molecule formation in confined two-component atomic mixture with transferring the energy release to the center-ofmass excitation of forming molecules.

D. J. Thouless, H. S. W. Massey, R. W. Hellwarth

R. F. Bishop, J. Arponen

We review the basic principles of the various coupled cluster (CC) methods based on an exponential form for the many-body wavefunction, and contrast them with the configuration–interaction (CI) method. Particular emphasis is placed on their applicability to problems in quantum chemistry. We prove that in all cases we can construct an energy functional which variationally determines both the ground–state wavefunction and the dynamic equations of motion for nonstationary states. As a result the equations of motion assume the familiar classical canonical Hamiltonian form in some well-defined (multibody) configuration space. We also thereby construct the expectation-value functional for an arbitrary operator in such a way that the Feynman–Hellmann theorem is preserved at all natural levels of truncation of the appropriate configuration space. We show in detail that only in the case of the recently introduced extended CC method (ECCM) is the expectation-value functional expressed fully in terms of linked (multilocal) amplitudes. The ECCM is thereby capable of describing such global phenomena as shape transitions and other stereochemical properties, and the large-scale behavior of the molecular energy surfaces. We illustrate our methodology on the one-body density matrix, which is now much more easily discussed than by conventional methods in quantum chemistry.

Jorge José Kohanoff