Nonadiabatic Field on Quantum Phase Space: A Century after Ehrenfest

Abstract

Nonadiabatic transition dynamics lies at the core of many electron/hole transfer, photoactivated, and vacuum field-coupled processes. About a century after Ehrenfest proposed “ Phasenraum ” and the Ehrenfest theorem, we report a conceptually novel trajectory-based nonadiabatic dynamics approach, nonadiabatic field (NAF), based on a generalized exact coordinate–momentum phase space formulation of quantum mechanics. It does not employ the conventional Born–Oppenheimer or Ehrenfest trajectory in the nonadiabatic coupling region. Instead, in NAF the equations of motion of the independent trajectory involve a nonadiabatic nuclear force term in addition to an adiabatic nuclear force term of a single electronic state. A few benchmark tests for gas phase and condensed phase systems indicate that NAF offers a practical tool to capture the correct correlation of electronic and nuclear dynamics for processes where the states remain coupled all the time as well as for the asymptotic region where the coupling of electronic states vanishes.