Liouville classical

The Liouville equation dictates how the classical statistical mechanical distribution fiinction t)... 

A particularly convenient notation for trajectory bundle system can be introduced by using the classical Liouville equation which describes an ensemble of Hamiltonian trajectories by a phase space density / = f q, q, t). In textbooks of classical mechanics, e.g. [12], it is shown that Liouville s equation... 

Tuckennan et al. [38] showed how to systematically derive time-reversible, areapreserving MD algorithms from the Liouville formulation of classical mechanics. Here, we briefly introduce the Liouville approach to the MTS method. The Liouville operator for a system of N degrees of freedom in Cartesian coordinates is defined as... 

A partial differential equation is then developed for the number density of particles in the phase space (analogous to the classical Liouville equation that expresses the conservation of probability in the phase space of a mechanical system) (32>. In other words, if the particle states (i.e. points in the particle phase space) are regarded at any moment as a continuum filling a suitable portion of the phase space, flowing with a velocity field specified by the function u , then one may ask for the density of this fluid streaming through the phase space, i.e. the number density function n(z,t) of particles in the phase space defined as the number of particles in the system at time t with phase coordinates in the range z (dz/2). 

Equation (37) is the quantum statistical analogue of Liouville s equation. To find the quantum analogue of the classical principle of conservation of phase density the solution to (37) is written in the form... 

Chaos provides an excellent illustration of this dichotomy of worldviews (A. Peres, 1993). Without question, chaos exists, can be experimentally probed, and is well-described by classical mechanics. But the classical picture does not simply translate to the quantum view attempts to find chaos in the Schrodinger equation for the wave function, or, more generally, the quantum Liouville equation for the density matrix, have all failed. This failure is due not only to the linearity of the equations, but also the Hilbert space structure of quantum mechanics which, via the uncertainty principle, forbids the formation of fine-scale structure in phase space, and thus precludes chaos in the sense of classical trajectories. Consequently, some people have even wondered if quantum mechanics fundamentally cannot describe the (macroscopic) real world. 

The evolution of an isolated system is then given by the classical and quantum Liouville equations for the fine-grained distribution functions (i.e., the evolution is entropy-preserving) ... 

The goal of this chapter is twofold. First we wish to critically compare—from both a conceptional and a practical point of view—various classical and mixed quantum-classical strategies to describe non-Born-Oppenheimer dynamics. To this end. Section II introduces five multidimensional model problems, each representing a specific challenge for a classical description. Allowing for exact quantum-mechanical reference calculations, aU models have been used as benchmark problems to study approximate descriptions. In what follows, Section III describes in some detail the mean-field trajectory method and also discusses its connection to time-dependent self-consistent-field schemes. The surface-hopping method is considered in Section IV, which discusses various motivations of the ansatz as well as several variants of the implementation. Section V gives a brief account on the quantum-classical Liouville description and considers the possibility of an exact stochastic realization of its equation of motion. 

V. QUANTUM-CLASSICAL LIOUVILLE DESCRIPTION A. General Idea... 

The dynamics of classical as well as of quantum systems can be described by a Liouville equation for the time-dependent density. In quantum mechanics, the Liouville equation for the density operator p(t) reads... 

The similar appearance of the quantum and classical Liouville equations has motivated several workers to construct a mixed quantum-classical Liouville (QCL) description [27 4]. Hereby a partial classical limit is performed for the heavy-particle dynamics, while a quantum-mechanical formulation is retained for the light particles. The quantities p(f) and H in the mixed QC formulation are then operators with respect to the electronic degrees of freedom, described by some basis states 4> ), and classical functions with respect to the nuclear degrees of freedom with coordinates x = x, and momenta p = pj — for example. 

Figure 17. Initial decay of the adiabatic population probability obtained for Model I. Compared are quantum results (thick line) and standard (thin full line) and energy-conserving (dotted line) quantum-classical Liouville results.

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