Relation of centroid molecular dynamics and ring-polymer molecular dynamics to exact quantum dynamics

Autor: Hele, Timothy J. H., Willatt, Michael J., Muolo, Andrea, Althorpe, Stuart C.
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Zdroj: J. Chem. Phys. 142, 191101 (2015)
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1063/1.4921234
Popis: We recently obtained a quantum-Boltzmann-conserving classical dynamics by making a single change to the derivation of the `Classical Wigner' approximation. Here, we show that the further approximation of this `Matsubara dynamics' gives rise to two popular heuristic methods for treating quantum Boltzmann time-correlation functions: centroid molecular dynamics (CMD) and ring-polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD). We show that CMD is a mean-field approximation to Matsubara dynamics, obtained by discarding (classical) fluctuations around the centroid, and that RPMD is the result of discarding a term in the Matsubara Liouvillian which shifts the frequencies of these fluctuations. These findings are consistent with previous numerical results, and give explicit formulae for the terms that CMD and RPMD leave out.
Databáze: arXiv