ISSN:
1089-7690
Source:
AIP Digital Archive
Topics:
Physics
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
Notes:
We develop a variational method for constructing the effective Hamiltonian that best propagates the state of a system, based on the minimization of a temporal error functional. As an illustrative example the procedure is used to derive the effective Hamiltonian in the time-dependent self-consistent-field method. The present variational approach is particularly useful to build the best effective Hamiltonian that is a linear combination of the generators of a Lie algebra. We explicitly consider systems having classical analogs with many degrees of freedom and calculate transition probabilities for a simple semiclassical model of the collinear collision between an atom and a diatomic molecule. We show that our variational approach is more general and accurate than the widely used local harmonic approximation.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.460811
