Non-adiabatic molecular dynamics and quantum solvent effects

Three novel approaches extending quantum-classical non-adiabatic (NA) molecular dynamics (MD) to include quantum effects of solvent environments are described. In a standard NA-MD the solute subsystem is treated quantum mechanically, while the larger solvent part of a system is treated classically. The three novel approaches presented here are based on the Bohmian formulation of quantum mechanics, the stochastic Schrodinger equation for the evolution of open quantum systems and the quantized Hamilton dynamics generalization of classical mechanics. The approaches extend the standard NA-MD to incorporate the following quantum effects of the solvent. 1. Branching, i.e., the ability of solvent quantum wave packets to split and follow asymptotically diverging trajectories correlated with different quantum states of the solute. 2. Decoherence, i.e., loss of quantum interference within the solute subsystem induced by the diverging solvent trajectories. 3. Zero point energy that contributes to NA coupling and must be preserved during the energy exchange between solvent and solute degrees of freedom. The Bohmian quantum-classical mechanics, stochastic mean-field and quantized mean-field approximations incorporate the quantum solvent effects into the standard quantum-classical NA-MD in a straight forward and efficient way that can be easily applied to quantum dynamics, of condensed phase chemical systems.