Classical initial conditions

Let us consider first the in vacuo cases. Dynamical aspects of the reaction in vacuo may be recovered by resorting to calculations of semiclassical trajectories. A cluster of independent representative points, with accurately selected classical initial conditions, are allowed to perform trajectories according to classical mechanics. The reaction path, which is a static semiclassical concept (the best path for a representative point with infinitely slow motion), is replaced by descriptions of the density of trajectories. A widely employed approach to obtain dynamical information (reaction rate coefficients) is based on modern versions of the Transition State Theory (TST) whose original formulation dates back to 1935. Much work has been done to extend and refine the original TST. 

The generalized definition of PAB was proposed on the basis of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality without any assumptions concerning properties of the fields. Whereas the standard definitions come from the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality under stationary-field condition. Thus, PAB according to the generalized definition cannot occur for classical fields. However, as we have shown in the parametric frequency converter with classical initial conditions, the classical nonstationary fields possibly exhibit PAB artifacts according to the standard definitions without violating any classical inequalities. 

On the one hand, chaos is good news. It explains the sense in which a classical mechanical system can forget where it came from. It implies that unless the initial conditions are fully tightly specified, the longer-time outcome is not totally determined. Initial classical conditions can never be truly fuUy specified because this calls for keeping an infinite number of digits for each number (position and velocity) and, in any case, quantum mechanics implies a necessary fuzziness in the classical initial conditions. Further, a real experiment will have even more... 

Vibrational motion is thus an important primary step in a general reaction mechanism and detailed investigation of this motion is of utmost relevance for our understanding of the dynamics of chemical reactions. In classical mechanics, vibrational motion is described by the time evolution and l t) of general internal position and momentum coordinates. These time dependent fiinctions are solutions of the classical equations of motion, e.g. Newton s equations for given initial conditions and I Iq) = Pq. 

As in classical mechanics, the outcome of time-dependent quantum dynamics and, in particular, the occurrence of IVR in polyatomic molecules, depends both on the Flamiltonian and the initial conditions, i.e. the initial quantum mechanical state I /(tQ)). We focus here on the time-dependent aspects of IVR, and in this case such initial conditions always correspond to the preparation, at a time of superposition states of molecular (spectroscopic) eigenstates involving at least two distinct vibrational energy levels. Strictly, IVR occurs if these levels involve at least two distinct... 

Even expression ( B3.4.31), altiiough numerically preferable, is not the end of the story as it does not fiilly account for the fact diat nearby classical trajectories (those with similar initial conditions) should be averaged over. One simple methodology for that averaging has been tln-ough the division of phase space into parts, each of which is covered by a set of Gaussians [159, 160]. This is done by recasting the initial wavefunction as... 

It is convenient to analyse tliese rate equations from a dynamical systems point of view similar to tliat used in classical mechanics where one follows tire trajectories of particles in phase space. For tire chemical rate law (C3.6.2) tire phase space , conventionally denoted by F, is -dimensional and tire chemical concentrations, CpC2,- are taken as ortliogonal coordinates of F, ratlier tlian tire particle positions and velocities used as tire coordinates in mechanics. In analogy to classical mechanical systems, as tire concentrations evolve in time tliey will trace out a trajectory in F. Since tire velocity functions in tire system of ODEs (C3.6.2) do not depend explicitly on time, a given initial condition in F will always produce tire same trajectory. The vector R of velocity functions in (C3.6.2) defines a phase-space (or trajectory) flow and in it is often convenient to tliink of tliese ODEs as describing tire motion of a fluid in F with velocity field/ (c p). 

In what is called BO MD, the nuclear wavepacket is simulated by a swarm of trajectories. We emphasize here that this does not necessarily mean that the nuclei are being treated classically. The difference is in the chosen initial conditions. A fully classical treatment takes the initial positions and momenta from a classical ensemble. The use of quantum mechanical distributions instead leads to a seraiclassical simulation. The important topic of choosing initial conditions is the subject of Section II.C. 

A classical molecular dynamics trajectory is simply a set of atoms with initial conditions consisting of the 3N Cartesian coordinates of N atoms A(X, Y, Z ) and the 3N Cartesian velocities (v a VyA v a) evolving according to Newton s equation of motion ... 

The strong shock regime is the classic archetype and is characterized by a single narrow shock front that carries the material from its initial condition into a new high pressure, elevated temperature, high kinetic energy state. Following a quiescent period at peak pressure, whose duration depends upon... 

In contrast to dissipative dynamical systems, conservative systems preserve phase-space volumes and hence cannot display any attracting regions in phase space there can be no fixed points, no limit cycles and no strange attractors. There can nonetheless be chaotic motion in the sense that points along particular trajectories may show sensitivity to initial conditions. A familiar example of a conservative system from classical mechanics is that of a Hamiltonian system. 

These can be solved by classical methods (i.e., eliminate Sout to obtain a second-order ODE in Cout), by Laplace transformation techniques, or by numerical integration. The initial conditions for the washout experiment are that the entire system is full of tracer at unit concentration, Cout = Sout = L Figure 15.7 shows the result of a numerical simulation. The difference between the model curve and that for a normal CSTR is subtle, and would not normally be detected by a washout experiment. The semilog plot in Figure 15.8 clearly shows the two time constants for the system, but the second one emerges at such low values of W t) that it would be missed using experiments of ordinary accuracy. 

A complete description of the method requires a procedure for selecting the initial conditions. At t 0, initial values for the complex basis set coefficients and the parameters that define the nuclear basis set (position, momentum, and nuclear phase) must be provided. Typically at the beginning of the simulation only one electronic state is populated, and the wavefunction on this state is modeled as a sum over discrete trajectories. The size of initial basis set (N/it = 0)) is clearly important, and this point will be discussed later. Once the initial basis set size is chosen, the parameters of each nuclear basis function must be chosen. In most of our calculations, these parameters were drawn randomly from the appropriate Wigner distribution [65], but the earliest work used a quasi-classical procedure [39,66,67], At this point, the complex amplitudes are determined by projection of the AIMS wavefunction on the target initial state (T 1)... 

For the past three decades deterministic classical systems with chaotic dynamics have been the subject of extensive study (Chirikov, 1979)-(Sagdeev et. al., 1988). Dynamical chaos is a phenomenon peculiar to the deterministic systems, i.e. the systems whose motion in some state space is completely determined by a given interaction and the initial conditions. Under certain initial conditions the behaviour of these systems is unpredictable. 

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