English

Wave packet dynamics in the optimal superadiabatic approximation

Chemical Physics 2016-06-29 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We explain the concept of superadiabatic approximations and show how in the context of the Born- Oppenheimer approximation they lead to an explicit formula that can be used to predict transitions at avoided crossings. Based on this formula, we present a simple method for computing wave packet dynamics across avoided crossings. Only knowledge of the adiabatic electronic energy levels near the avoided crossing is required for the computation. In particular, this means that no diabatization procedure is necessary, the adiabatic energy levels can be computed on the fly, and they only need to be computed to higher accuracy when an avoided crossing is detected. We test the quality of our method on the paradigmatic example of photo-dissociation of NaI, finding very good agreement with results of exact wave packet calculations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.02610,
  title  = {Wave packet dynamics in the optimal superadiabatic approximation},
  author = {Volker Betz and Benjamin D. Goddard and Uwe Manthe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.02610},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

12 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:06:38.222Z