Communication: XFAIMS—eXternal Field Ab Initio Multiple Spawning for electron-nuclear dynamics triggered by short laser pulses

Abstract

Attoscience is an emerging field where attosecond pulses or few cycle IR pulses are used to pump and probe the correlated electron-nuclear motion of molecules. We present the trajectory-guided eXternal Field Ab Initio Multiple Spawning (XFAIMS) method that models such experiments “on-the-fly,” from laser pulse excitation to fragmentation or nonadiabatic relaxation to the ground electronic state. For the photoexcitation of the LiH molecule, we show that XFAIMS gives results in close agreement with numerically exact quantum dynamics simulations, both for atto- and femtosecond laser pulses. We then show the ability of XFAIMS to model the dynamics in polyatomic molecules by studying the effect of nuclear motion on the photoexcitation of a sulfine (H2CSO).