Aharonov-Albert-Vaidman's weak values are investigated by a semiclassical method. Examples of the semiclassical calculation that reproduces "anomalous" weak values are shown. Furthermore, a complex extension of Ehrenfest's quantum-classical correspondence between quantum expectation values of the states with small quantum fluctuation, and classical dynamics, is shown.
We propose a scheme allowing to observe the evolution of a quantum system in the semiclassical regime along the paths generated by the propagator. The scheme relies on performing consecutive weak measurements of the position. We show how weak trajectories" can be extracted from the pointers of a series of measurement devices having weakly interacted with the system. The properties of these "weak trajectories" are investigated and illustrated in the case of a time-dependent model system.
We study fidelity decay by a uniform semiclassical approach, in the three perturbation regimes, namely, the perturbative regime, the Fermi-golden-rule (FGR) regime, and the Lyapunov regime. A semiclassical expression is derived for fidelity of initial Gaussian wave packets with width of the order $\sqrt{\hbar}$ ($\hbar$ being the effective Planck constant). Short time decay of fidelity of initial Gaussian wave packets is also studied, with respect to two time scales introduced in the semiclassical approach. In the perturbative regime, it is confirmed numerically that fidelity has the FGR decay…
The semiclassical propagator in the representation of SU(n) coherent states is characterized by isolated classical trajectories subjected to boundary conditions in a doubled phase space. In this paper we recast this expression in terms of an integral over a set of initial-valued trajectories. These trajectories are monitored by a filter that collects only the appropriate contributions to the semiclassical approximation. This framework is suitable for the study of bosonic dynamics in n modes with fixed total number of particles. We exemplify the method for a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in …
Semiclassical calculations using the Herman-Kluk initial value treatment are performed to determine energy eigenvalues of bound and resonance states of the collinear helium atom. Both the $eZe$ configuration (where the classical motion is fully chaotic) and the $Zee$ configuration (where the classical dynamics is nearly integrable) are treated. The classical motion is regularized to remove singularities that occur when the electrons collide with the nucleus. Very good agreement is obtained with quantum energies for bound and resonance states calculated by the complex rotation method.
Semiclassical Mechanics allows for a description of quantum systems which preserves their phase information, while using only the system's classical dynamics as an input. Over the time an identification has been developed between stationary phase approximation and semiclassical mechanics. Although it is true that in most of the cases in semiclassical mechanics the significant contributions come from the neighborhood of the stationary points, there are some important exceptions to it. In this paper we address one of these exceptions, occurring in the evaluation of the time evolution of the expe…
A mixed semiclassical initial value representation expression for spectroscopic calculations is derived. The formulation takes advantage of the time-averaging filtering and the hierarchical properties of different trajectory based propagation methods. A separable approximation is then introduced that greatly reduces (about an order of magnitude) the computational cost compared with a full Herman-Kluk time-averaging semiclassical calculation for the same systems. The expression is exact for the harmonic case and it is tested numerically for a Morse potential coupled to one or two additional har…
Optimal entrainment of a quantum nonlinear oscillator to a periodically modulated weak harmonic drive is studied in the semiclassical regime. By using the semiclassical phase reduction theory recently developed for quantum nonlinear oscillators, two types of optimization problems, one for the stability and the other for the phase coherence of the entrained state, are considered. The optimal waveforms of the periodic amplitude modulation can be derived by applying the classical optimization methods to the semiclassical phase equation that approximately describes the quantum limit-cycle dynamics…
We numerically compare the semiclassical ``frozen Gaussian'' Herman-Kluk propagator [Chem. Phys. 91, 27 (1984)] and the ``thawed Gaussian'' propagator put forward recently by Baranger et al. [J. Phys. A 34, 7227 (2001)] by studying the quantum dynamics in some nonlinear one-dimensional potentials. The reasons for the lack of long time accuracy and norm conservation in the latter method are uncovered. We amend the thawed Gaussian propagator with a global harmonic approximation for the stability of the trajectories and demonstrate that this revised propagator is a true alternative to the Herman-…
Using phase-space complexification, an Initial Value Representation (IVR) for the semiclassical propagator in position space is obtained as a composition of inverse Segal-Bargmann (S-B) transforms of the semiclassical coherent state propagator. The result is shown to be free of caustic singularities and identical to the Herman-Kluk (H-K) propagator, found ubiquitously in physical and chemical applications. We contrast the theoretical aspects of this particular IVR with the van Vleck-Gutzwiller (vV-G) propagator and one of its IVRs, often employed in order to evade the non-linear "root-search" …
The method of integrals of motion is used to construct families of generalized coherent states of a nonrelativistic spinless charged particle in a constant electric field. Families of states, differing in the values of their standard deviations at the initial time, are obtained. Depending on the initial values of the standard deviations, and also on the electric field, it turns out to be possible to identify some families with semiclassical states.
We study the Casimir force in piston-like geometries semiclassically. The force on the piston is finite and physical, but to leading semiclassical approximation depends strongly on the shape of the surrounding cavity. Whereas this force is attractive for pistons in a parallelepiped with flat cylinder head, for which the semiclassical approximation by periodic orbits is exact, this approximation to the force on the piston vanishes for a semi-cylindrical head and becomes repulsive for a cylinder of circular cross section with a hemispherical head. In leading semiclassical approximation the sign …
We study the quantum tunnel effect through a potential barrier employing a semiclassical formulation of quantum mechanics based on expectation values of configuration variables and quantum dispersions as dynamical variables. The evolution of the system is given in terms of a dynamical system for which we are able to determine effective trajectories for individual particles, in a total resemblance of the Bohmian description of quantum mechanics. We obtain a type of semiclassical confinement for particles in a similar way as with the quantum potential, and also determine a semiclassical transmis…
Recent experimental progress using ultracold gases in optical lattices necessitates a quantitative theoretical description for a significant number of bosons. In the present paper, we investigate if time-dependent semiclassical initial value methods, with propagators expressed as integrals over phase space using classical trajectories, is suitable to describe interacting bosons, concentrating on a single mode. Despite the nonlinear contribution from the self-interaction, the corresponding classical dynamics allows for a largely analytical treatment of the semiclassical propagator. We find that…
The algebra of polynomials in operators that represent generalized coordinate and momentum and depend on the Planck constant is defined. The Planck constant is treated as the parameter taking values between zero and some nonvanishing $h_0$. For the second of these two extreme values, introduced operatorial algebra becomes equivalent to the algebra of observables of quantum mechanical system defined in the standard manner by operators in the Hilbert space. For the vanishing Planck constant, the generalized algebra gives the operator formulation of classical mechanics since it is equivalent to t…
The recently introduced mixed time-averaging semiclassical initial value representation molecular dynamics method for spectroscopic calculations [M. Buchholz, F. Grossmann, and M. Ceotto, J. Chem. Phys. 144, 094102 (2016)] is applied to systems with up to 61 dimensions, ruled by a condensed phase Caldeira-Leggett model potential. By calculating the ground state as well as the first few excited states of the system Morse oscillator, changes of both the harmonic frequency and the anharmonicity are determined. The method faithfully reproduces blueshift and redshift effects and the importance of t…
We present detailed numerical simulations of semiclassical and quantum spectra of a cavity quantum electrodynamics system consisting of a single three-level atom in $Λ$-configuration with one of its transitions strongly interacting with a quantized cavity mode while the other is driven by a coherent classical field. After deriving the equations of motion for the expected values of the system operators from the master equation, we compute numerically the semiclassical and quantum spectra of the system under various levels of external driving field strengths. In the semiclassical approach we neg…
We present an Initial Value Representation for the semiclassical coherent state propagator based on complex trajectories. We map the complex phase space into a real phase space with twice as many dimensions and use a simple procedure to automatically eliminate non-contributing trajectories. The resulting semiclassical formulas do not show divergences due to caustics and provide accurate results.
This paper presents a Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) implementation of the Semiclassical Initial Value Representation (SC-IVR) propagator for vibrational molecular spectroscopy calculations. The time-averaging formulation of the SC-IVR for power spectrum calculations is employed. Details about the GPU implementation of the semiclassical code are provided. Four molecules with an increasing number of atoms are considered and the GPU-calculated vibrational frequencies perfectly match the benchmark values. The computational time scaling of two GPUs (NVIDIA Tesla C2075 and Kepler K20) respectivel…
For two Coulombically interacting electrons in a quantum dot with harmonic confinement and a constant magnetic field, we show that time-dependent semiclassical calculations using the Herman-Kluk initial value representation of the propagator lead to eigenvalues of the same accuracy as WKB calculations with Langer correction. The latter are restricted to integrable systems, however, whereas the time-dependent initial value approach allows for applications to high-dimensional, possibly chaotic dynamics and is extendable to arbitrary shapes of the potential.
This paper concerns an approximation of the expectation values of the position and momentum of the solution to the semiclassical Schrödinger equation with a Gaussian as the initial condition. Of particular interest is the approximation obtained by our symplectic/Hamiltonian formulation of the Gaussian wave packet dynamics that introduces a correction term to the conventional formulation using the classical Hamiltonian system by Hagedorn and others. The main result is a proof that our formulation gives a higher-order approximation than the classical formulation does to the expectation value dyn…
We investigate the tunneling process between two symmetric stable islands of a forced pendulum Hamiltonian in the weak chaos regime. We show that when the tunneling doublet is quantized over a classical non-linear resonance the tunneling rate strongly deviates from the semiclassical prediction. This mechanism is responsible for the irregular dependence of the tunneling rate on the system parameters. The weak-chaos condition allows us to make a theoretical prediction which agrees very well with the numerical results. This opens up a possible avenue to a general theory on the dependence of quant…
A machine learning algorithm for partitioning the nuclear vibrational space into subspaces is introduced. The subdivision criterion is based on Liouville's theorem, i.e. best preservation of the unitary of the reduced dimensionality Jacobian determinant within each subspace along a probe full-dimensional classical trajectory. The algorithm is based on the idea of evolutionary selection and it is implemented through a probability graph representation of the vibrational space partitioning. We interface this customized version of genetic algorithms with our divide-and-conquer semiclassical initia…
Using a semiclassical model of photodetection with Poissonian noise and insights from quantum metrology, we prove that linear optics and photon counting can optimally estimate the separation between two incoherent point sources without regard to Rayleigh's criterion. The model is applicable to weak thermal or fluorescent sources as well as lasers.
Quantized systems whose underlying classical dynamics possess an elaborate mixture of regular and chaotic motion can exhibit rather subtle long-time quantum transport phenomena. In a short wavelength regime where semiclassical theories are most relevant, such transport phenomena, being quintessentially interference based, are difficult to understand with the system's specific long-time classical dynamics. Fortunately, semiclassical methods applied to wave packet propagation can provide a natural approach to understanding the connections, even though they are known to break down progressively a…
We generalize our earlier work on the symplectic/Hamiltonian formulation of the dynamics of the Gaussian wave packet to non-Gaussian semiclassical wave packets. We find the symplectic forms and asymptotic expansions of the Hamiltonians associated with these semiclassical wave packets, and obtain Hamiltonian systems governing their dynamics. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the dynamics give a very good approximation to the short-time dynamics of the expectation values computed by a method based on Egorov's Theorem or the Initial Value Representation.
We show that the usual Born-Oppenheimer type of approximation used in quantum gravity, in which a semiclassical time parameter emerges from a weak-coupling expansion of the Wheeler-DeWitt constraint, leads to a unitary theory at least up to the next-to-leading order in minisuperspace models. As there are no unitarity-violating terms, this settles the issue of unitarity at this order, which has been much debated in the literature. Furthermore, we also show that the conserved inner product is gauge-fixed in the sense that the measure is related to the Faddeev-Popov determinant associated with th…
We address frequency-dependent quantum transport through mesoscopic conductors in the semiclassical limit. By generalizing the trajectory-based semiclassical theory of dc quantum transport to the ac case, we derive the average screened conductance as well as ac weak-localization corrections for chaotic conductors. Thereby we confirm respective random matrix results and generalize them by accounting for Ehrenfest time effects. We consider the case of a cavity connected through many leads to a macroscopic circuit which contains ac-sources. In addition to the reservoir the cavity itself is capaci…
We extend former results for coherent states on the circle in the literature in two ways. On the one hand, we show that expectation values of fractional powers of momentum operators can be computed exactly analytically by means of Kummer's confluent hypergeometric functions. Earlier, these expectation values have only been obtained by using suitable estimates. On the other hand, we consider the Zak transformation not only to map harmonic oscillator coherent states to coherent states on the circle as it has been discussed before, but we also use the properties of the Zak transformation to deriv…
We introduce a semiclassical theory for strong localization that may arise in the context of many-body thermalization. As a minimal model for thermalization we consider a few-site Bose-Hubbard model consisting of two weakly interacting subsystems that can exchange particles. The occupation of a subsystem ($x$) satisfies in the classical treatment a Fokker-Planck equation with a diffusion coefficient $D(x)$. We demonstrate that it is possible to deduce from the classical description a quantum breaktime $t^*$, and hence the manifestations of a strong localization effect. For this purpose it is e…