Seminar

Conditional wavefunction approach to the structure and dynamics of many-body systems

By
Guillem Albareda (Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Hamburg)
Date
Place
Zoom
seminar ICCUB
The interacting conditional wavefunction approach is a recently introduced method for performing quantum dynamics simulations that is multiconfigurational by construction, and hence that is able to capture quantitative accuracy for situations where mean-field theory fails. The technique is highly parallelizable and reformulates the traditional "curse of dimensionality" by using a stochastic wavefunction ansatz that is based on an interacting set of single-particle conditional wave functions. Despite the successes of the method to describe non-equilibrium quantum processes in model systems, the efficiency of the method for describing the dynamics of real systems is yet to be proven. A particular drawback of the method is the lack of a consistent solution of the time-independent Schrödinger equation, which makes the applicability of the method limited to systems for which, e.g., the ground state can be exactly calculated. We have recently filled this gap by putting forth an imaginary-time variation of the method. I will provide a throughout revision of the real- and imaginary-time versions of the method and show the ability of the method for capturing static and dynamic properties in model systems made of interacting electrons, nuclei and photons.