Harmonic oscillators dynamics

Mavri, J., Berendsen, H.J.C. Dynamical simulation of a quantum harmonic oscillator in a noble-gas bath by density matrix evolution. Phys. Rev. E 50 (1994) 198-204. 

Fig. 5. Langevin trajectories for a harmonic oscillator of angular frequency u = 1 and unit mass simulated by a Verlet-like method (extended to Langevin dynamics) at a timestep of 0.1 (about 1/60 the period) for various 7. Shown for each 7 are plots for position versus time and phase-space diagrams.

Because the degrees of freedom decouple in the linear approximation, it is easy to describe the dynamics in detail. There is the motion across a harmonic barrier in one degree of freedom and N — 1 harmonic oscillators. Phase-space plots of the dynamics are shown in Fig. 1. The transition from the reactant region at q <0 to the product region at q >0 is determined solely by the dynamics in (pi,qi), which in the traditional language of reaction dynamics is called the reactive mode. 

The book thus embraces an extended study on a variety of issues within the theory of orientational ordering and phase transitions in two-dimensional systems as well as the theory of anharmonic vibrations in low-dimensional crystals and dynamic subsystems interacting with a phonon thermostat. For the sake of readability, the main theoretical approaches involved are either presented in separate sections of the corresponding chapters or thoroughly scrutinized in appendices. The latter contain the basic formulae of the theory of local and resonance states for a system of bound harmonic oscillators (Appendix 1), the theory of thermally activated reorientations and tunnel relaxation of orientational... 

Semiclassical techniques like the instanton approach [211] can be applied to tunneling splittings. Finally, one can exploit the close correspondence between the classical and the quantum treatment of a harmonic oscillator and treat the nuclear dynamics classically. From the classical trajectories, correlation functions can be extracted and transformed into spectra. The particular charm of this method rests in the option to carry out the dynamics on the fly, using Born Oppenheimer or fictitious Car Parrinello dynamics [212]. Furthermore, multiple minima on the hypersurface can be treated together as they are accessed by thermal excitation. This makes these methods particularly useful for liquid state or other thermally excited system simulations. Nevertheless, molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations can also provide insights into cold gas-phase cluster formation [213], if a reliable force field is available [189]. 

Figure 2.6 The potential V(r) that corresponds to the dynamical symmetry (I). The potential is nonrigid because [cf. Eq. (2.113)] the rotational spacings are comparable to the vibrational ones. Tn the harmonic limit V(r) is the potential of an isotropic harmonic oscillator.

The strategy, usually adopted to achieve a theoretical description of this complex dynamics, is to describe the influence of the solvent environment on the electron-transfer reaction within linear response theory [5, 26, 196, 197] as linear coupling to a bath of harmonic oscillators. Within this model, all properties of the bath enter through a single function called the spectral density [5, 168]... 

In this approach, the diffusion constant, Di, is related to the corresponding characteristic time, x, describing the distortions of the normal coordinate, Westlund et al. (85) used the framework of the general slow-motion theory to incorporate the classical vibrational dynamics of the ZFS tensor, governed by the Smoluchowski equation with a harmonic oscillator potential. They introduced an appropriate Liouville superoperator ... 

The dynamics of the normal mode Hamiltonian is trivial, each stable mode evolves separately as a harmonic oscillator while the imstable mode evolves as a parabolic barrier. To find the time dependence of any function in the system phase space (q,pq) all one needs to do is rewrite the system phase space variables in terms of the normal modes and then average over the relevant thermal distribution. The continuum limit is introduced through use of the spectral density of the normal modes. The relationship between this microscopic view of the evolution... 

Another striking example of entanglement-mediated dynamics was presented in Ref. [94]. There we considered a two-level system that first reaches the state of equilibrium with a bath of harmonic oscillators, a state in which large... 

We start our discussion of laser-controlled electron dynamics in an intuitive classical picture. Reminiscent of the Lorentz model [90, 91], which describes the electron dynamics with respect to the nuclei of a molecule as simple harmonic oscillations, we consider the electron system bound to the nuclei as a classical harmonic oscillator of resonance frequency co. Because the energies ha>r of electronic resonances in molecules are typically of the order 1-10 eV, the natural timescale of the electron dynamics is a few femtoseconds to several hundred attoseconds. The oscillator is driven by a linearly polarized shaped femtosecond... 

Consider a one-dimensional classical harmonic oscillator (Figure 3.1). Phase space in this case has only two dimensions, position and momentum, and we will define the origin of this phase space to correspond to the ball of mass m being at rest (i.e., zero momentum) with the spring at its equilibrium length. This phase point represents a stationary state of the system. Now consider the dynamical behavior of tlie system starting from some point other than the origin. To be specific, we consider release of the ball at time to from... 

The attenuation of die dipole of the repeat unit owing to thermal oscillations was modeled by treating the dipole moment as a simple harmonic oscillator tied to the motion of the repeat unit and characterized by the excitation of a single lattice mode, the mode, which describes the in-phase rotation of the repeat unit as a whole about the chain axis. This mode was shown to capture accurately the oscillatory dynamics of the net dipole moment itself, by comparison with short molecular dynamics simulations. The average amplitude is determined from the frequency of this single mode, which comes directly out of the CLD calculation ... 

The simple class of models just discussed is of interest because it is possible to characterize the decay of correlations rather completely. However, these models are rather far from reality since they take no account of interparticle forces. A next step in our examination of the decay of initial correlations is to find an interacting system of comparable simplicity whose dynamics permit us to calculate at least some of the quantities that were calculated for the noninteracting systems. One model for which reasonably complete results can be derived is that of an infinite chain of harmonic oscillators in which initial correlations in momentum are imposed. Since the dynamics of the system can be calculated exactly, one can, in principle, study the decay of correlations due solely to internal interactions (as opposed to interactions with an external heat bath). We will not discuss the most general form of initial correlations but restrict our attention to those in which the initial positions and momenta have a Gaussian distribution so that two-particle correlations characterize the initial distribution completely. Let the displacement of oscillator j from its equilibrium position be denoted by qj and let the momentum of oscillator j be pj. On the assumption that the mass of each oscillator is equal to 1, the momentum is related to displacement by pj =. We shall study... 

Messina et al. [25] test the time-dependent Hartree reduced representation with a simple two-degree-of-freedom model consisting of the h vibration coupled to a one-harmonic-oscillator bath. The objective function is a minimum-uncertainty wavepacket on the B state potential curve of I2. Figure 12, which displays a typical result, shows that this approximate representation gives a rather good account of the short-time dynamics of the system. 

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